Carl Hiaasen - Chomp

Eventually the rough spots in the show were smoothed out, and Expedition Survival! turned into a smash hit. It wasn’t long before Derek Badger was an international celebrity, and he quickly learned to act like one.

“How’s France?” Raven Stark asked when she called.

“Heaven,” he said. “The cheese here is fantastic.”

“I’m sure,” said Raven Stark, with a note of concern. Survivalists were supposed to be lean and fit, and one of her main responsibilities was to keep Derek from getting too flabby. It wasn’t easy-the man loved to eat, and cheese was high on his list.

“Did you find me a proper alligator?” he inquired.

“Yes, a beauty.” She could hear him chewing and smacking his lips.

“How big?”

“Twelve feet,” said Raven Stark.

“Brilliant!”

“And they’ve got a slightly smaller one you can tussle with.”

There was a pause on the other end that made Raven Stark uneasy.

Derek said, “But I don’t want to wrestle the small one. I want to wrestle the monster.”

It was exactly the response she had feared. “Too dangerous,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“We can chat about this later, Derek.”

“Indeed we will. What about a python? I told you I wanted a python.”

“The gentleman has offered us a very large Burmese, though it’s not tame.”

“Even better!” chortled Derek.

Raven Stark sighed to herself. She was accustomed to working around Derek’s enormous ego, but there were times when she felt like reminding him that he was basically a tap dancer, not a grizzled woodsman.

“Anything else that’s super-scary?” he asked.

“I noticed they had a large snapping turtle,” she said.

“How large?”

“Large enough to take off a hand.”

“Excellent,” Derek said. “Set up an underwater scene-I’m swimming along through the Everglades, minding my own business, when the hungry snapper charges out from under a log and drags me to the bottom of the lagoon.”

“Right. Except turtles don’t eat people.”

“How do you know?” Derek demanded.

“Call me when you land in Miami,” said Raven Stark.

Wahoo had an older sister named Julie who was finishing law school at the University of Florida in Gainesville. His father was secretly proud of her, but he wouldn’t let on.

“Just what the world needs-another darn lawyer,” he’d grumble.

“I love you, too, Dad,” Julie would say, and pinch his cheek.

Wahoo thought his sister was pretty cool, although he sometimes felt intimidated because she was so smart and funny and sociable. Wahoo was shy, and not as self-confident. Julie had always been a straight-A student while Wahoo wasn’t: his best-ever report card was two A’s, four B’s and a C (in algebra, naturally).

“Just do your best,” his mom would say. “That’s good enough for us.”

Mickey Cray never really took an interest in the children’s schoolwork because he was too busy with the animals.

“Put the old man on the phone,” Julie said when she called.

“He’s out working with the pythons,” Wahoo reported.

“It’s about the Expedition contract. I see problems.”

Wahoo always faxed the TV contracts to his sister for her to see, even though his father normally signed them without reading a word.

“What’s wrong, Jule?”

“Like, on page seven, it says the show ‘shall have unrestricted use of the designated wildlife specimens for the duration of the production period.’ That means they can do pretty much whatever they please with the animals-and they don’t need to ask Pop’s permission.”

“This is bad,” Wahoo said. He remembered what Raven Stark had said about Derek Badger wanting to wrestle one of the gators.

“Did the old man take any money yet?” Julie asked.

Wahoo told his sister about the eight-hundred-dollar deposit. She said Mickey could still get out of the deal if he returned the cash.

“Too late. He already spent it,” said Wahoo.

“On what-monkey chow?”

“The mortgage.”

“Ouch,” said Wahoo’s sister.

“We’re sort of broke, Jule. Ever since he got hurt, it’s been tough.”

“So that’s why Mom went to China. Now I get it.”

Wahoo didn’t want his sister to worry, so he tried to sound upbeat. “Pop’s been doing way better since we took this job.”

“Who is this Derek Badger character, anyway?”

“You’ve never seen the show?”

Julie chuckled. “I don’t even own a TV, little bro. All I do up here is crack the books.”

“Derek Badger is a survivalist guy,” Wahoo said. He explained the adventure format of the program.

His sister said, “Give me a break.”

“He’s huge, Jule.”

“Tell Dad what I said about the contract.”

“Do I have to?” Wahoo said.

He was only half kidding. He knew it would be his problem soon enough.

Mickey Cray was barefoot in the backyard with Beulah the python. He was admiring the markings on her skin-rich, chocolate-colored saddles on a sleek silvery background. Fourteen feet of raw muscle, and a brain the size of a marble.

Ever since he was a boy, Mickey had kept snakes for pets-green tree snakes, king snakes, rat snakes, water snakes, ring-necked snakes, garter snakes, even a few poisonous rattlers and moccasins. Mickey had caught them all. He still found them fascinating and mysterious.

Now the Everglades was overrun with foreign pythons that were eating the deer, birds, rabbits, even alligators-it was really a rough scene. The pythons weren’t supposed to be there; Southeast Asia was their natural home. So the U.S. government and the state of Florida had declared war on them.

Wahoo’s father understood why: the snakes were totally disrupting the balance of nature. A single adult Burmese could lay more than fifty eggs at a time. They were among the largest predators in the world, growing to a length of twenty feet, and at that size had no natural enemies. Even panthers avoided them.

Because of his knowledge and experience, Mickey Cray had been asked to go into the swamps and capture as many of the intruder reptiles as he could. The state was paying decent money, but Mickey said no. He knew that every python he caught would be euthanized, and he couldn’t bring himself to take part in that. He liked snakes too much. That was the problem.

He sat down on the ground near Beulah and she glided slowly in his direction. Her brick-sized head was elevated, the silky tongue flicking slowly.

Mickey grinned. “When’s the last time you got fed?”

Beulah responded by clamping down on Mickey’s left foot and throwing a meaty coil around both his legs.

“Easy, princess,” he said.

The python wrapped upward with another coil, and then another. Mickey quickly locked both arms in front of his chest to protect his lungs from being crushed, but he was out of shape and Beulah was extremely powerful.

“Wahoo!” he hollered. “Yo!”

“What?” called a voice from the house.

“Get your butt out here!”

The snake was chewing on Mickey’s foot as if it were a rabbit. He knew better than to struggle, for that would only cause Beulah to tighten her grip.

Wahoo came running. When he saw what the python was doing to his father, he yelled, “Don’t move!”

“Oh, that’s a good one,” Mickey gasped. “I was thinking of dancing a jig.”

“What the heck happened?”

“You forgot to feed her is what happened.”

“No way! She ate last week, I swear, Pop.”

“What did you give her-a cup of yogurt? Look at the poor girl, she’s starving!”

Wahoo suspected his dad might be right-adult pythons often went weeks between meals. Maybe he had forgotten to feed her.