Precious Reynolds – scratched by a rabid cat outside her elementary school in rural Humboldt County – arrived at UC Davis Children's Hospital in Sacramento on May 1 with about a 2 percent chance of survival.

Few expected the 8-year-old Wiyot Indian girl to make it out of the pediatric intensive care unit alive.

She couldn't walk, couldn't swallow, felt pain in her neck and back, and had an infection that had spread to her brain.

As her father, Willie Reynolds, 31, put it Sunday: "She was pretty close to death."

But Precious – a 51-pound spitfire who rides sheep in rodeos and can outwrestle some of the boys on her wrestling team – wasn't going down easily.

The second-grader fought hard – and became the third person in U.S. history to recover from rabies without getting the vaccine, usually injected right after contact.

Nobody knew the feral cat that had scratched Precious in April was infected until she started getting sick two weeks later.

"It was black and white, and scratched me right here on my left arm," Precious indicated as she sat in a wheelchair at Children's Hospital and prepared for a lunch of pizza, noodles and olives.

Precious said she was at recess at Trinity Valley Elementary School in Willow Creek when the cat scratched her because she got too close.

There are lots of feral cats around the school because kids like to feed them, her dad said.

"There was one cat that nobody messes with – she would only let Precious feed her," Reynolds said.

Humboldt County animal control officers have rounded up a lot of the cats, but the rabid feline has not been caught, Reynolds said.

Kids should never play with or touch wild or feral animals, even if they're sick, injured or dead, "and if you think your child's been bitten or scratched by a wild animal, go to an emergency room," said hospital spokeswoman Phyllis Brown.

"If you want to live, you should not hesitate – the rabies vaccination is only four or five shots that aren't painful."

The cat scratch didn't faze Precious. She went to her teacher to get a Band-Aid to stop the bleeding. She told her older sister she'd been scratched, "then told my grandma that I did my homework and went outside and played."

But on April 27, the symptoms started hitting. When her legs buckled and she couldn't swallow or talk, doctors thought she had the flu, but her grandmother, Shirlee Roby, said, "this is no damn flu."

After Precious made several trips to hospitals in Humboldt County, Children's Hospital sent a small plane for the girl, along with her father and grandmother.

Dr. Theresa Vlautin, the Children's Hospital pediatrician who coordinated the flight from Mad River Community Hospital in Arcata, thought Precious probably had a viral infection that had spread to her brain.

"Rabies was not on my list," Vlautin said.

Rabies can be spread from dead or living bats, cats, dogs, skunks, foxes and other animals. It hits the nervous system, ultimately causing encephalitis or acute inflammation of the brain, and almost always death.

When doctors discovered May 5 that Precious had rabies, a team led by Dr. Jean Wiedeman, associate professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Children's Hospital, consulted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state Department of Public Health's encephalitis and special investigations section, and the health departments of Humboldt and Sacramento counties.

There were as many as 20 consultations a day while Precious was kept on a breathing tube, then placed in an induced coma while being given an antiviral medication – a treatment pioneered in Wisconsin in 2004 with a 16 percent survival rate.

But Precious "truly is a fighter," Wiedeman said.

"I was scared as hell, but I knew she was going to make it," said Roby, 58, who's been with her granddaughter every day.

When Precious passed the critical two-week mark without crashing, "I've never seen so many faces go from frowns to smiles," said Roby.

After lunch Sunday, the scrappy girl jumped out of her wheelchair.

When Roby told her to hold on to her chair, Precious flexed her muscles, revealing her T-shirt emblazoned with the words, "Justin Beiber Says Never Say Never."

She called Roby over to demonstrate "how to put a boy in an arm- and headlock and flip them over."

Precious applied the hold, then teased Roby: "Talk to the booty, the hand is off duty."

Precious can't wait to get back to mutton riding, competing for the Klamath Trinity Wrestling Club and playing with her friends and three siblings.

First on her list is "playing with Copper, my cow dog." Photos of Copper and her friends and family cover the walls of her hospital room, which she shares with a bevy of stuffed animals.

"I'm going home June 22," Precious declared confidently.

Vlautin gave Precious a big hug and whispered in her ear, "You make me proud to be a doctor."

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