“You must be feeling better,” Wahoo remarked. He was pleased to see his dad up and moving around so early.

“My headache’s gone!” Mickey announced.

Wahoo said, “No way.”

“All those pills the doctors made me swallow, they didn’t do a darn thing. Then all of a sudden I wake up and, boom, it’s like a miracle.” Mickey shrugged. “Some things just can’t be explained, son.”

But Wahoo had a theory that his father had been cured by five simple words: one thousand dollars a day.

Mickey said, “Go fetch some lettuce for Gary and Gail.”

Gary and Gail were two ancient Galapagos tortoises that Wahoo’s dad had purchased from a zoo in Sarasota many years earlier, when he was new to the wildlife business. These days there wasn’t much demand from the TV nature shows for Gary and Gail, because tortoises were not exactly dynamic performers. Mickey Cray kept them around mainly for sentimental reasons. Each of the animals was more than a century old, and he didn’t trust any of the other wranglers to treat them properly. The night before the big freeze, Mickey had gone out back and carefully cloaked Gail and Gary with heavy quilts so they wouldn’t die. Wahoo had watched from his bedroom window.

“I don’t suppose he’s interested in these two,” Mickey muttered while the tortoises munched loudly on their lettuce.

“No, they said he wants Alice,” said Wahoo, “and a major python.”

They were talking about their famous new client, Derek Badger. He was the star of Expedition Survival! one of the most popular shows on cable. Every week, Derek would parachute into some gnarly wilderness teeming with fierce animals, venomous snakes and disease-carrying insects. Armed with only a Swiss army knife and a straw, he would hike, climb, crawl, paddle or swim back to civilization-or until he was “rescued.” Along the way, he’d eat bugs, rodents, worms, even the fungus on tree bark-the grosser it looked, the happier Derek Badger was to stuff it into his cheeks.