BHOPAL: Attacked by a jackal, a 65-year-old Dalit woman in MP’s Shivpuri district held her nerves and the canine’s jaws for a good 30 minutes, and finally managed to strangle the animal with her sari. She then collapsed from exhaustion and blood loss, waking up in hospital hours later with 18 bite wounds.Surajia Bai Jatav, a widow and small farmer of Barkhadi village, was found unconscious in her field late Monday and taken to hospital by villagers. She had gone to her field around 5 pm to cut fodder. As she bent to lift a bundle of grass near a culvert, a jackal pounced upon her, biting her on the legs and hands.“I thought I was going to die,” she said from the hospital bed. Alone and bleeding, she grabbed the jackal’s jaws and held it down, even as it kept biting her.After an agonising 25-odd minutes, weak and losing blood, Surajia tore a long strip from her sari, made a loop and slipped it around the jackal’s neck. As the animal lunged again, she pulled the cloth tight and held it using all her power until the jackal stopped moving. Then, she fell unconscious beside it.“We feared the worst until she opened her eyes well past midnight,” said a relative.“She is stable, on anti-rabies injections, and should recover in about a week,” said a doctor. TNN