The Sleeping Dragon.
The name of my first tattoo shop used to have a mascot named, Savannah. She was two and a half feet long and was a terribly vicious animal. A killer of many little animals.
Meal worms to full grown mice.
I could hold her only after she had eaten and as soon as she was warm enough she would get rowdy in my arms and I knew it was time to put her away.
Her home was a glass display case that I had turned into a fully encased habitat for her with a heat rock, a
tunnel and a decorated tub of water which looked like a pool with plastic plants and stuff. Just like an oasis in the desert.
I remember watching her spin in the tub of water, bathing herself and then scurrying back to her heat rock where she would sleep for days at a time.
At least that's how it seemed.
When the door would slide open to her habitat her eyes would open and she would hiss and lift her belly from the ground.
Sometimes I would have to open the door to it. It was necessary to see if she was living. Jajaja. She would hibernate on that rock so long it made us all wonder.
I ran across a few of these images and it triggered a memory.

When ever I opened that slide door she would awaken and she would hiss and then I would drop a mouse in the habitat with her and she would watch its movements.
She would stalk it from corner to corner of her habitat until the mouse found its way to her.
She would haunch down and straighten her body as though the mouse needed her to point.
There would be a wiggle in her tail and then, SNAP! Just like a mouse trap.
Those jaws would open and that was the end. Mice went head first down her throat, whole and all that was left would be a little mouse tail hanging out of Savannah's mouth.
Some of my favorite days in the shop were the days I was able to feed Savannah.
Man she was a vicious dragon. I remember her bite very well. And so do many other reptile lovers who came along. She bit us all.
As soon as she would warm up, she would try to escape. And a few times she did. There was no taming Savannah. She wasn't the type I dressed up or put on a leash and walked around town.
She was a dragon. She didn't breath fire but she had it. It burned from deep inside and you could hear it when she hissed.
Not like a snake.
She hissed from a way deeper, guttural diaphragm. It was scary. And her body language was louder than most people speak.
We had decided that she was a hunter and that now that I could feed her two mice at once, she might be eating them really fast. So I decided to make it a little Interesting.
So I stacked a few rocks in a pile so that the mice could hide away from this ferocious lizard.
It made things interesting indeed.
I seen Savannah become the avid hunter I always knew she was.
I remember being young. I wasn't always so bright. I wasn't always this rad wordsmith that you're reading today.
Admittedly, I confess that I got off on some Wild shit. But I dunno. It's what I did.
I would get stoned and look into this habitat like I was God watching the world below. Something that happens everyday here on earth. One animal eats the other.
One feeds the other. One hunts to eat. The true predator makes its living on the blood of others and will do what it takes, to keep on doing so.
It was the lesson, I thought.
You see, but then something happened.
One day I threw a mouse in her space. And she ate it.
I mean like, no contest. The mouse had no chance at all to even make it to the rocks.
Savannah went back to her heat rock and she laid there and I had thought everything was fine.
Later that nite I was locking up the shop and as I was passing her glass case, I looked in and she had regurgitated the mouse. I stood there a moment to make sure she was okay and she went back to her heat rock underneath her log tunnel.
As she was crawling back to her rock the mouse started crawling back to the rock pile I had made.
Survival was the new lesson. That if you wanted to live and even if you were in the belly of the beast, that you could actually survive it.
The mouse wasn't able to use its back legs. So it scurried under that rock pile and I thought for sure that it was done for and I would be cleaning it up in the morning.
The next morning I came in and I seen that the mouse was still living.
Savannah didn't ever touch that mouse again. It lived in the habitat for about a month stealing water and it started eating off Savannah's toes.
  Over time, I started to notice all those little bite marks. I was sure that during these little battles, Savannah would end up killing this little mouse like she did so many others.
It scratched her eye so she couldn't see out of her right side. The mouse who didn't have back legs was crippling my dragon everyday.
That mouse taught me that even in the face of adversity, we must adapt and the lesson is, we are dealt the cards we have but none of them mean anything when even the prey, may become the hunter.
The mouse taught me how to eat an elephant. One bite at a time.
I loved my dragon. I think back on Savannah and think about how many opportunities I had to save Her from the mouse but I figured that eventually she would kill the little fucker. I even put another mouse in there and she ate him. But not that crippled little shit.
I should have killed that mouse for her. But I didn't. That mouse died on its own. But Savannah lost seven toes and an eye.
I eventually wound up having to

euthanize her. It just wasn't right.
This memory makes me feel bad.