The Gecko That Started It All

This gecko was the first gecko we found in the house. Well, Nova found it.

He bit the tail off, and the gecko was bruised up pretty badly (it was also shedding its skin, which makes it look even more poorly) and I wasn't sure if it would survive.

This type of gecko pretends to be a scorpion when cornered. Nova is a scorpion slayer, so Nova reacted like he would to a scorpion. Which means the first thing Nova does is rip off the tail to disarm it.

However, the moment Nova realized it wasn't a scoprion, he brought it to me and dropped it on the bed next to me (I was almost asleep) and demanded I pay attention to it.

The gecko was in shock, understandably, but once I got it into a tiny container, it started moving around and showing that it was alive.

If you'd like to understand how tiny this gecko was, the hairs in this photo belong to Nova. That's how big hairs are next to this gecko.

So I took him outside and released him on our back patio.

By the next day, I saw three more geckos inside the house, and Nova began catching them to bring to me as presents. (He does the same thing with bugs. Luckily he doesn't bring me spiders or scorpions. In fact, the reason why he's a scorpion slayer is because I was sleeping one night a few years ago and a scorpion crawled into bed with me and stung the bottom of my foot twice. Ever since, Nova has hunted and slaughtered them. For which I am very grateful.) Every gecko he brought me after that first gecko was completely intact and unharmed, save for having some cat drool on them.

Nova and the geckos made a game of this, and soon, our house was full of geckos. It was an unusually cold summer here in El Paso. We have fire ant infestations every year, and the geckos were eating the fire ants. The fire ants have this thing for me, where they will sting the hell out of me even if I'm just sleeping. (Out of curisosity I began testing them with my medications, it turns out, something about my heart medication and the way it makes me smell pisses them the hell off and they want me dead.)

So the fire ants disappeared and Nova had a bunch of gecko friends. B and I both agreed that we didn't mind having the geckos in the house and we both preferred an infestation of geckos over an infestation of fire ants.

There was more than one occasion when I watched Nova walk by me with a gecko on his head or his back or clinging to the fur on his chest. The geckos loved him and he loved the geckos.

I would also find them snuggled up with Nova while he was sleeping, and occasionally snuggled up to my own feet, using our bodies for heat in our air conditioned bedroom.

Also something I didn't mind that much. I love reptiles.

About five weeks after Nova had brought me the gecko in this photo, I ran into that very same gecko again. Tail mostly regrown, body grown much more, and perfectly healthy, though he had battlescars from that first encounter with Nova when it pretended to be a scorpion.

After that gecko had been injured, none of the other geckos pretended to be scorpions, so we all peacefully coexisted for a while.

The geckos seem to have found a place to hibernate through the winter, as I haven't seen one in the house since early November.

I miss our little gecko friends, and so does Nova.

For a while we were calling Nova the King of the Geckos. He seemed to like being called that.


Backblipped on 1/12/15