After a week, you might think that hope was fading, but Asil Kealey never doubted that she would be reunited with her missing golden bearded dragon.
Asil had only arrived in Golden Bay the previous day from the North Island, when she headed to the Collingwood Rugby Grounds with Mad Café owner Nganga to beautify the grandstand.
She painted the clubroom poles with images of spiritual guardians, while Krishna basked in the sunshine on Nganga’s windscreen.
At some point, she turned to check on her lizard companion, and Krishna was gone.
Asil searched high and low that day, and for many days after, supported by about 20 members of the Collingwood community, but her beloved Krishna was nowhere to be found.
With the colder weather coming, Asil was terribly worried for Krishna, but she was confident that they would be reunited.
“I kept my faith all the time,” she says simply.
A spiritual person, she intuited that Krishna would reappear on the ninth day.
She also felt that her daughter Ash would be the one to discover her.
Ash and her nine-year-old daughter Willow flew down to help after Krishna had been missing for a week.
That night, Ash had a dream that she found the dragon immediately, and that she was hiding in plain sight near where she had gone missing.
The next morning, the family headed to the rugby grounds.
Ash used the guidance of her pendulum to search the area, and whenever she moved from the spot that Krishna had gone missing, the pendulum called her back.
“Then I looked up, and she’s eye to eye in a bush, staring at me,” Ash laughs.
She grabbed the reptile and put her straight onto her chest for warmth, calling to the others that Krishna had been found.
The dragon had dulled in colour during her outing, and Ash says that that made her harder to spot – the search parties had been looking for a brightly glowing creature.
Krishna came to Asil when the golden dragon was four months old, and the pair have been inseparable companions for two years.
“She sleeps in the van on a hot water bottle. She swims with me in the river and the ocean,” Asil says.
“Krishna’s loved by so many wherever we go. She glows so brightly.”
When The Guardian talked to Asil about Krishna’s adventures, the lizard would certainly have been easy to find.
The pair were cruising around the Warehouse in Motueka, with Krishna the bearded dragon enjoying the vantage spot from atop Asil’s head.
