There is a prehistoric creature lurking in my hallway, and he wants to eat me.

No, this isn't a nightmare, or some sort of delusion brought on by cold weather and cabin fever. He's really there, and he's getting bigger every day. I can't complain, though, since I put him there.

It all started a couple of Christmases ago, when my wife gave me an aquarium. But not just any aquarium; this one was built specifically to house turtles.

You would think that any old aquarium would work just fine for turtles, and you'd be right. But there are some fundamental differences between fish and turtles that lead to differences in the way you set up their aquarium homes. For one, fish are generally happy to stay in the aquarium, while turtles sometimes get the urge to explore life outside the glass walls. So while an aquarium housing fish can be filled almost to the top, the same can't be said if the aquarium is for turtles; the water lever has to be kept low enough that they can't reach up and climb out.

Unfortunately, many aquarium filters won't work properly if the water level is too low, and a turtle aquarium needs filtration. GOOD filtration, and lots of it. A turtle's… errr… output is significantly more than that of a fish, or even a bunch of fish. Put a turtle in an unfiltered aquarium, and before long you've got an aquarium that needs to be flushed.

But the special turtle aquarium I was given had one side with a cutout; a filter could be hung on the cutout, and when the tank was filled to that level, the filter would work as it was supposed to. Which means you can have the needed lower water level, and a filter that is working at 100% of its ability.

All I needed was turtles. But it was Christmas, and not exactly the time of year that you want to go tromping around in the lake, looking for turtles. And even if you wanted to, you wouldn't find any; turtles have been around for millions of years, and one reason is because they know better than to be out and about in the middle of winter.

Besides, taking a couple of young turtles out of their natural habitat wasn't the kind of thing I wanted to do, even though any turtle I might catch in December wouldn't be living anywhere for very long. Fortunately, I had a better option; I knew where I could buy some captive-raised turtles. Getting turtles that were born I captivity (to parents who might very well have been born in captivity as well) was much more appealing to me than plucking a Lake Martin turtle from its home. Plus, I didn't have to wait until spring to get them.

By the middle of January the new turtle aquarium was set up, and was the happy home for two tiny Red-Eared Sliders. They weren't much bigger than a quarter, so their twenty-gallon home was like an ocean to them.

Their diet consisted of tiny dried brine shrimp, and after a few weeks of feasting, they had gotten big enough to move on to eating larger food pellets. They would eat these right from our fingers, and would swim excitedly every time they saw us getting near the aquarium; one of them even learned to do the backstroke. In time, they even figured out a way to let us know that they wanted food; they would splash their feet and bump up against the glass walls of the aquarium, and it would create enough racket that we could hear it from another room.

My wife named them Myrtle and Ertle. I've always thought that there was no reason to give a name to something that wouldn't come when you called it; snakes, turtles and cats, for example. And Myrtle and Ertle wouldn't come when called, though they would come when they heard their can of food rattle; I guess that makes them more advanced than some cats.

Myrtle and Ertle thrived. We would take them to the lake with us, setting their aquarium on the porch so they could soak up some sunlight. We even took them to Birmingham with us a few times; we would go up to visit my dad, and set Myrtle and Ertle up in his old greenhouse.

That's where they were on that blistering August day that a family "friend" decided that, even though I had the greenhouse door propped open, and even though I had told everyone "the turtles are in the greenhouse" and "don't close the door to the greenhouse," and even though she had gone in to look at them and commented on how cute they were… even after all of that, she decided that she knew best, so she removed the prop, and closed the greenhouse door. Within minutes the temperature soared to somewhere near 140 degrees. Long before the temperature had peaked, Myrtle and Ertle were dead; they probably hadn't lasted more than a minute or two after the door had closed.

(The family "friend" left before I could confront her, and I haven't seen her since. If she's lucky, I'll never see her again; if I do see her and I'm lucky, I'll get a light sentence, and I'll be out of prison before I turn 60.)

I was devastated; my wife was even more so. The aquarium in the hall was now a painful reminder of Myrtle and Ertle, and their tragic, untimely demise. I thought about dismantling it, but decided that the best, most therapeutic thing to do would be to turn it back into a place of life.

Unfortunately, though, it would be several months before I could get more Red-Eared Sliders; they often hatch in late fall, and aren't seen until spring. And the place I had gotten the captive-bred turtles wouldn't have any more for a few months.

But the weekend after the greenhouse tragedy, I got lucky. While walking in a creek in the back of a slough, I found a hatchling turtle. Like the other two, this one was a little bigger than a quarter; unlike them, though, he was a Snapping Turtle. But, since I was only planning on keeping him until I could get some more of the captive-bred Sliders, he would do.

Unfortunately, by the time I got some Sliders, it was too cold to re-release the snapper. And now he is no longer the size of a quarter; all he has done for the last six months is eat and grow. Now he's bigger than my hand; speaking of my hand, I'm pretty sure he wants to eat it. Every time I feed him I can feel his beady little eyes staring at my fingers; I know he's thinking "These little food pellets are OK, I guess, but I'd really be much happier if I could have one of those pink things that drops the pellets into the water."

Hopefully, I'll be able to return him to his rightful place sometime this month; if the weather won't cooperate, the month after that. It will take two hands to lift him from the aquarium, and I'll have to carry him in a bucket; it will be easier to carry the bucket if I have all 10 fingers, but time will tell if that's a reality.