There’s a certain status that comes with having a grown gator for a pet.

When the boys on the school bus would argue about whose dog was tougher than whose, I could end the big talk by pointing out my gator could eat any of their dogs.

Technically, the gator belonged to Mr. Calvin Bagley, our neighbor. He had gone fishing one day and came back with a little alligator, not much more than a baby. He asked my Grandpa if he could put it in our pond. I don’t know when that happened, but it was some years before I was born in the early 1960s.

There were plenty of alligators in the Okefenokee swamp, but that was more than 20 miles away. They weren’t something you saw every day around Bickley, a farming community of barely 100 people. The gator was grown by the time I became aware of him, and he filled me with awe, fear and pride. Dang straight, we had us a gator.

Home to us was 420 acres of southeast Georgia farmland. The fields were mostly rectangular and named mostly for where they were. There was The Field in Front of the House, The Field Behind the House, The Field Across the Branch, The Big Field, The Little Field, The Back Field and The George Thomas Field, so named because it had once been the homestead of a man named George Thomas.

In between the fields were rows of planted pines. In the wiregrass understory, where there wasn’t a gallberry bush, there was a dwarf palmetto. If those species were fighting a silent war for territory, it was a draw. A creek ran north to south through the whole farm.

The gator lived beside The Field in Front of the House. Dug out of some clay was a pond about 20-feet wide and 100-feet long. I guess it was 8–10 feet deep, because the 20-foot wide, 100-foot long clay hill beside it was 8–10 feet high. There was also a small natural waterhole at the east end of the pond with a narrow sliver of dry land between them.

As much as he fascinated me, I rarely saw the gator. There was always work to be done. And when we weren’t doing chores, my brother, our neighbor Timmy Rowell and me were running through the woods with our dogs and BB guns.

The gator’s pond, though, was also our fishing hole. So, we’d take our cane poles and a can of worms up the dirt road, jump the ditch and walk the path between the field and a stand of planted pines. Once we got close, we’d stop and look around to see where he was. He had never been aggressive toward us, but we didn’t want to see what he’d do if we accidentally stepped on or tripped over him either.

Mr. Calvin could call the gator to him, using a grunting sound he made with his mouth closed. He would walk down to the pond, carrying a galvanized steel bucket full of table scraps. Stale bread, chicken, beef and pork bones, pinto beans, cornbread and such, all mixed together. He grunted with the plastic tip of his cigarillo clenched in his teeth. The gator swam up, came part way out of the water and opened his huge mouth filled with white teeth. Mr. Calvin dumped the bucket directly in and the gator closed his mouth and swallowed. The whole transaction took place in less than a minute.

When I was a teenager, my father delivered some bad news. Seems the gator had wandered and got himself run over by a log truck over on the Nicholls Highway. It’s hard to recall all these years later what his injuries were, but I seem to remember Daddy saying a good bit of the gator’s tail was torn off. I never saw the gator again after that. Daddy speculated he moved to a much bigger and swampier pond up the road, perhaps looking for other gators. I hope so. That’s a much better ending than him dying in the woods from internal bleeding or infection.

It still feels like there’s a certain status that comes with having grown up with a gator for a pet.

My Pet Gator was originally published in Invironment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.