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hungry.”
    “That’s just great.” Derek looked over at Raven. “I had a bad feeling about this whole operation—didn’t I tell you?”
    Wahoo’s dad said, “You wanna see the inside of his mouth?” He broke a thin branch off a pine tree, stripped away the sprigs and handed it to the TV star. “Try this.”
    Raven grew concerned. “Derek, you be careful.”
    “Yes, Mum!” He laughed and got down on his knees again, this time a bit closer to the turtle. As soon as the cameras started rolling, he used the sharp end of the branch to poke at the pointy snout of the reptile, which shut its eyes and drew itself into its shell.
    “C’mon, Terrible Timmy,” Derek cooed, “say aaahhhh.”
    Wahoo knew he had to do something fast. Quietly he moved behind the cameraman nearest to Derek and made a pushing motion with both hands, a signal to back off. Either Derek didn’t see him, or pretended not to.
    The bite was a hissing blur. Everyone flinched at the crack of the branch being chomped in half, a few shortinches from Derek’s wide eyes. He gasped in surprise and tumbled sideways into the lagoon. The turtle wasn’t far behind, paddling furiously toward the cool, quiet bottom, where Alice the alligator had been—until that moment—peacefully snoozing.
    The director hollered, “Cut! Cut!”
    Mickey Cray was applauding. “Hey, that’s good stuff.”
    Two crew members hurried forward to drag Derek, cursing, from the water. The beak of the snapping turtle had peeled a sliver of flesh from the tip of his artificially tanned nose, now punctuated with a bright red dot of blood.
    Raven Stark angrily cornered Wahoo and his father. “You two think this is funny? Derek could have been maimed!”
    Mickey shrugged. “That’s why they’re called snappers, not yawners.”
    “You’re the one who gave him that stick!”
    “Well, it’s better than using a finger,” said Mickey. “Right, son?”
    Wahoo nodded ruefully, displaying the fleshy bump where his right thumb once had been. Behind him Derek was bellowing at the director, ordering him to erase all the video footage of the turtle encounter.
    “If I see one minute of that on YouTube, everybody on this crew is fired!” Derek warned as he toweled off. “And I mean
everybody
!”
    Next they tried the python, Beulah.
    Wahoo and his father uncoiled the beautiful, multi-hued constrictor and laid her out at full length. The script calledfor Derek to creep up and seize Beulah behind her head, instigating a fake life-or-death struggle. Mickey Cray didn’t mention that Beulah had tried to eat his foot a few days earlier; the swelling had gone down and his limp was barely noticeable.
    Over Derek’s objections, Mickey insisted on conducting a rehearsal so he could demonstrate the safest way to handle the big snake.
    Derek barely paid attention. “Piece o’ cake, mate,” he kept saying.
    “Sometimes she bites,” Wahoo reminded him.
    “Ha! Never show you’re afraid, because animals can sense it,” said Derek. “Do you even know what true primal fear smells like?”
    “Not really. Asparagus?”
    Derek’s eyes narrowed as he tried to figure out if he’d just been insulted.
    As it turned out, Beulah showed no interest in biting anyone during the run-through. She was sleepy and sluggish, her belly still full from the microwaved chickens that Wahoo had fed her after she’d tried to make a meal of his father.
    “Okay, this one’s for real!” said the director. “Action!”
    Soon Derek was crawling through Mickey Cray’s manicured palmetto scrub, whispering dramatically into a bug-sized microphone clipped to his shirt collar:
    “As if the Everglades weren’t dangerous enough, in recent years this tropical river of grass has been invaded by lethal
predators from another continent—Burmese pythons! Imported by wildlife brokers for the exotic pet trade, hundreds and hundreds of baby pythons got scattered throughout the Glades when Hurricane Andrew destroyed breeding