E-Mail This Article to a Friend Tooth or dare Quick: What’s got 9.5 fingers and a snake in its trousers? BY SALLY CRAGIN

Ever since Ted McRae became "T.M. the Gator Guy" for the "Greatest Show on Earth," there’s been slightly less of him. Eight weeks into his first tour with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which arrives at the FleetCenter on October 10, one gator (who has since been rotated out of the troupe) bit off half his thumb. When McRae returned to the circus, his colleagues decided T.M. stood for "Thumb Missing."

But this wasn’t the most painful event in his career as a wrangler of large and unruly mammals and reptiles. He once had a gig tending big cats. "I actually think the tiger claw going through my other hand hurt more," he reflects. Once bitten, twice shy? Not McRae, who returned to the big top with his snazzy saurians just six weeks after the gator ate his digit. "I couldn’t wait to get back," he says, on the phone from a Michigan tour stop. He will soon have been on the job two years, "if I live through the next seven weeks," he adds hastily. "I put my head in an alligator’s mouth, so I don’t like to assume too much. People ask me about the future and I say, ‘That’s a bit arrogant.’"

The Baltimore native always had a magic touch with creepy-crawlies. "My mother tells stories that I’d come home with snakes stuffed down my pants," he says. "I was a loner-type kid, and when everyone else was wrestling and playing games in the street, I’d go three blocks up and four blocks over to Leakin Park, a part of the woods where you shouldn’t be, and that’s where I was." Fascinated by anything wild, McRae kept a series of snakes, getting his first boa constrictor when he was 15. That event pretty much put the kibosh on get-togethers for his extended family. "They wouldn’t come to the house because I had big snakes in the bedroom."

T.M.’s act includes a half-dozen alligators and three pythons, who subsist on a diet of chicken, beef, and treats from a specialty shop called Gourmet Rodents. (Gators and snakes need the bones, fur, and teeth.) A touring schedule of shows Wednesday through Sunday means the beasts get a few days off. The hiatus can occasionally encourage them to commune with their wild side. "Wednesday is a better show for me, because I’m more alert," he says. "Sometimes on Friday, after three days’ worth of shows, they’re all snappy."

Despite a childhood spent "pulling things out of mud puddles," McRae came to the circus when he "was full grown and should have known better," he laughs. "Back in ’94, I was driving a forklift at a paint warehouse and my cousin called. He was starting a circus, the UniverSoul Circus, and asked if I’d work the lion-and-tiger act. Within two days, I’d left my job and flown to Sarasota to work with the lady who had the cats." Two weeks after that, he’d run off to the circus for real (though his wife and three sons travel with him).

UniverSoul Circus led McRae to the larger Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus. Then Kenneth Feld, the owner of Ringling Bros., caught his act and decided he’d be boffo with the big lizards. "When I was working with cats, I’d say, ‘Cats are people too,’" McRae says. But the gators are a different story. "They’re very alien from us," he says. "If you get up close on an alligator, I’m telling you, T. rex couldn’t have looked much different."

The gators and pythons travel in a customized trailer that includes a swimming pool, water misters, and heaters for warming their bellies. But despite the accommodations, "sometimes,I don’t really know what happens," says McRae. "They forget, and they go back to being like you found them in the woods. You get the same one you got yesterday, and he wants to chase you out of the truck."

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus comes to the FleetCenter October 10 through 19. Tickets are $10 to $25; call (617) 931-2000, or visit www.ringling.com.