There's a gentle disturbance in the surface as the immense body changes course and steers directly at the chick.
The male raptor turns and starts running uphill. Raptor Red's sister tries to follow but slips and skids sideways down the sand dune. Raptor Red sprints between them. She stops, looking in panic both up - and downhill. But then she doesn't know what to do. Her sister gets up and just misses Raptor Red with a swipe of her fore-paw.
Out of the corner of her eye, Raptor Red sees the body shadow of a sea-monster coming at the chick.
She gives the alarm call, but her sister ignores it and begins to climb the dune after the male. In the next instant, an avalanche of sand bowls the male and Raptor Red's sister over. They lie sputtering at the foot of the dune. A four-foot-long head juts out from the dune crest and snarls. Then the neck and shoulders emerge. Then the massive thighs of the acrocanthosaur.
Raptor Red screams another alarm call. The chick standing in the surf sees the acro and backs out further into the water, unknowingly putting herself in an ideal spot to be attacked by the sea-monster. The chick is now in water up to her hips and she's having a hard time staying upright in the tidal surge.
Raptor Red's sister is lying on her back, half buried in the dune. The male acro is crashing clumsily down through the sand. The sister looks at the acro, then at the male raptor, then back at the acro.
She twists her body around and attacks the male raptor.
Raptor Red yells in exasperation. The hoarse scream means You IDIOT!
Raptor Red grabs her sister's tail and drags her down the slope. The charging acro pauses. He's confused by all the raptors yelling at each other. It seems to be some newfangled group defense he's never seen before.
The female acro walks briskly along a diagonal route across the dune face. She's older and wiser than her consort. She knows sand and she knows raptors. She knows that the raptor pack is fighting among themselves.
Raptor Red recognizes immediately that the female acro is the real threat to her sister and the male raptor. But the giant sea-reptile is closing in on the raptor chick.
For a horrible second Raptor Red is sure she's going to lose her mate, her sister, and her niece.
But then the thought strikes. Her brain puts two things together.
Raptor Red charges the female acro, screaming her loudest. She brushes past the snapping acro muzzle. A mouthful of four dozen enormous ivory teeth, each saw-edged, clamps shut a few inches from Raptor Red's skin.
Raptor Red whirls and strikes. Her index finger makes a shallow but painful cut on the acre's upper lip.
The female acro blinks hard. She looks at the male raptor and at Raptor Red's sister, hissing at each other as they retreat to the left. Then the acro looks at Raptor Red, yelling defiantly to the right, at the edge of the water.
The acro runs after Raptor Red. I've got it cornered - its back is against the sea, the acro thinks to herself.
And the charging acro does close the distance rapidly. Raptor Red splashes noisily out into the salt water.
I've got it -1 can wade out farther than she can! The acro's brain sends messages of confidence to her legs.
Raptor Red turns and runs through the water, parallel to shore. She passes the raptor chick, frozen in fear, and knocks it down.
The acro ignores the chick and follows Raptor Red through the surf. The long, strong acro shins and ankles slosh through the water with ease.
The distance is down to a few yards. Another second, and I'll strike, the acro thinks. Her sensory system preps her neck and jaws.
The acro snaps her neck backward into a tight S-curve. Muscle groups work against each other -tensing the head and neck and torso. The whole joint-muscle apparatus is a coiled weapon, ready to fire and send the jaws down and forward.
KAWOOOOOOSH! Raptor Red is knocked backward. Her head goes six feet under. Her muzzle drags along the bottom. Wet sand is stuffed up her nostrils.
KAWOOOOOOOSH! A second explosive force sends tons of water over her, rolling her body along the bottom.
Salt water clogs her throat.
Five more surges keep her from grabbing the bottom with her hindclaws.
Raptor Red jabs all six of her foreclaws into a clump of brown seaweed. Then she jams one set of hindclaws in between two submerged rocks. She sticks her head and neck up as far as they'll go.
Her nostrils break the surface. She spits out green water and a mouthful of salty mud. Her right eye opens just above the surface.
Drops of hot blood spatter the water all around her. She looks around. It's a hideous sight.
Streams of bright red arterial blood are squirting up from the surface. The acro has a huge open wound in the thorax that exposes three broken ribs and lacerated viscera. A hindleg, dislocated at the knee, flaps about in uncoordinated spasms.
A three-yard-long kronosaur snout swings viciously to the side, seizing the acrocanthosaur leg and spinning the acro body beneath the waves.
Raptor Red struggles to the shore and looks back. The acrocanthosaur surfaces again, her left thigh and shin flexing convulsively. The kronosaur shifts his jaws up his victim's body, clamping his giant tooth-row across the acro's neck. The krone's flippers on the right side tilt upward as he dives to his left, dragging the acro down again.
Back on shore the raptor chick who had been in the water rushes up to the sand dune. Both raptor chicks huddle next to their mother.
The male acro on the beach has sat down. He's staring at the water's surface where his mate disappeared. He sees the acro resurface a hundred yards farther out. This time her body is nearly limp. There's just a faint hint of movement in the corner of the mouth.
Raptor Red walks out of the surf. She's very happy. And she's proud of herself too. This is the best victory she's scored in her life as a predator. It's better than bringing down an iguanodon. It's better than a group assault on a twenty-ton astro.
This time she beat an acrocanthosaur with her brain, not her claws.
She trots up the sand dune diagonally.
The male acro has already retreated to the dune crest. He catches one last glimpse of his mate, two hundred yards out, her body is being spun around by the thirty-ton kronosaur.
The acro male is unhurt, but his spirit is gone. He trudges away in retreat.
Raptor Red follows cautiously. She watches the acro grow smaller and smaller until he vanishes beyond the next line of dunes. She looks down. Her sister is calling to her. Raptor Red joins the two chicks in an orgy of snout rubs and reciprocal grooming. Everyone seems in splendid shape.
Raptor Red jerks her head up and sniffs. Her good mood disappears. She trots back up to the dune crest and surveys the landscape.
There! she says to herself. There he is.
She can see her male consort two hundred yards away to the north. She's confused. Is he afraid? Does he know we won? She calls to him. He doesn't respond. She calls again. He's moving.
He's trotting away from her.
Raptor Red stretches her muzzle high and makes a single piercing call.
The male freezes. He turns his head. Maybe he's making a return call, but Raptor Red can't hear it.
Maybe that's not him, she thinks. She sniffs and stares and sniffs again. No doubt about it, that's her male's distinctive smell.
The male is standing still, looking back at her. This has happened before - he'll come back, Raptor Red thinks.
She detects something else in the air - the scent of female Utahraptors, the group of strangers camping nearby.
Far to the north she can see them, tiny figures making slow body movements.
Raptor Red does not know what to do next.
She stands quietly and watches the young male turn and walk quickly north.
Raptor Red stays there, high on the dune crest, for five hours. His scent gets fainter and fainter. He's not coming back.
SEGNO CAVES
JANUARY
Raptor Red pauses to catch her breath. The moun
tain air takes getting used to. She knows that they are traveling north. North is the direction she and her original mate came from three and a half long years ago. Now she and her sister and the two chicks are going north involuntarily. It's the only direction that seems free of acrocanthosaur hordes.
A week after Raptor Red lured the female acro to her death in the surf, three more family groups of acros showed up on the beach. It was too much for Raptor Red and her sister to deal with. Winds from the north were free of acro scent, so the raptor pack went north.
And up. The Utahraptor family's flight leads them to higher and higher elevations, far higher than Raptor Red has ever been.
After a long day of zigzagging up a mountain valley, Raptor Red's sister nuzzles her. It surprises Raptor Red. Her sister is not the huggy type.
Her sister's mind is usually a muddle of conflicting rages that she can barely control. She fears and hates the smell of other raptors. She's driven to apoplectic anger when she senses acrocanthosaurs nearby. And she flails her arms in frustration when the physical elements go against her - when it's too windy or too rainy or too hot.
One central purpose holds her thoughts together: protect her chicks, protect her family, protect her sister.
Now penetrating through her paranoid and frequently frantic intellectual fog is the realization that Raptor Red is sad. And Raptor Red's sister has finally figured out that this sadness began when the young male left.
To Raptor Red's sister, the young male was a dangerous annoyance. She hated him from day one. She wanted to get rid of him. She never could figure out why Raptor Red protected him.
She still doesn't understand. But she wants to make Raptor Red feel better, so she nuzzles and gurgles awkwardly. She's trying hard, but her instinctive skills of comforting a sibling are poorly developed.
Raptor Red turns away. She still blames her sister for depriving her of her young mate.
Her sister follows, making exaggerated submissive movements with head very low. She's not very good at it. She's had little practice in submission rituals.
Her clumsiness eventually causes her to run her snout directly into a fallen log. She trips, tries to regain her balance by digging her left forepaw into the ground, tumbles over herself, and lands on her back with a sour look on her face.
If evolution had given Raptor Red a full set of lip muscles, she'd smile.
She moves over to her sister and gracefully caresses her neck and shoulders.
Raptor Red lets her sister make all the decisions now. She's the pack leader. And the pack continues to go up, climbing the seaward side of a mountain range clothed in heavy forests of tree ferns and tall conifer trees. The air becomes clearer, fresher, and much colder, especially at night.
Raptor Red pauses to stick her snout high in the breeze. Yes indeed, there are no acrocanthosaurs here. She sniffs again and sighs. There are no Utahraptor males either.
The pack feasts on a dead iguanodon they find covered by fallen leaves. Raptor Red winces when she cuts the meat with her teeth. The iguanodon's flesh feels hard and cold against her gums. She tastes ice crystals in the connective tissue.
Raptor Red's sister looks up at the sky. Her keen eyes follow something small and light falling in irregular spirals. Maybe a bug.
Snap! She jumps up and bites at the whitish fleck. No taste. No crunch.
Another whitish speck comes down. She watches, stone still, to see what the bug will do.
She takes a very shallow breath. The bug zips into her nostril and dissolves immediately, leaving a cold, wet sensation for a split second.
Cold bug. Strange, she thinks to herself.
The night becomes frigid, but the sisters find abundant pine needles to build a temporary nest, and the older chick helps like an adult in this housekeeping chore. The scent and sounds coming from the montane forests show that there's plenty of game.
One of their local neighbors is a small iguanodon species with a spotted hide who runs in big herds and is easy to kill.
The pack wakes up to a heavy fog clinging to the ground. Raptor Red's sister is thirsty. Up ahead is a pond nestled among lichen-covered boulders. She trots ahead of the rest of the pack and squats down.
But as she stoops to drink, she whacks herself against a rock, bruising her nostril. At least that's what she thinks.
She examines the pond edge carefully. There are no rocks in sight.
Again she stoops, and again she whacks herself.
She growls at the water. She hisses. The water doesn't ripple at all.
Weird water, she thinks. Bad water.
She reaches out to scratch the pond. Her middle finger hits the surface and bounces off.
Now she stands up and screeches a full threat.
Raptor Red and the older chick rush up to help defend her.
Raptor Red's sister reacts the way she always does. She thrusts her right hindfoot at the pond. I'll fix you - I'll rip you open with my killing claw, she's thinking.
Her claw hits the pond and slides forward. She slips and falls on her rump. She expects a splash. She gets a knock on her dinosaurian derriere instead.
Raptor Red is very curious about this strange hard water. She takes a more inquisitive, less confrontational approach to the problem than her sister. She presses one foot hard against the water's surface where some reeds are growing. Cold water oozes up alongside the reeds.
CRACK! A jagged piece of water breaks off. Raptor Red backs up. She's never seen water act like this.
She sniffs. She nudges the water with her snout. Then she bites tentatively at a piece. She tries to drop the piece of water, but it sticks to her lip. She shakes her head and the piece of ice drops and shatters against a rock.
Late that afternoon, it snows.
Raptor Red watches, fascinated, as the wet, cold, fluffy layer gets thicker and thicker on the ground. The small chick huddles against her side, shivering. Shivering is why Raptor Red's pack can survive in this climate - it turns up their internal thermostat so heat production from body tissue increases.
Raptor Red has noticed that the ponds and rivers here are devoid of crocodiles and turtles that are so common at lower elevations. Crocs and turtles can't shiver.
Raptor Red's sister doesn't like the snow, and all her growling and hissing just seems to make the snow come down faster. She glances at her chicks. Both are now shivering next to their aunt.
Must find a hole, the chicks' mother thinks to herself. Raptor Red's sister has always been the best of the pack in finding holes to hide in.
She sets out with grim determination. Cold can be as dangerous to chicks as an acrocanthosaur. She needs a burrow to shield her family.
For three hours the pack searches for shelter. The snow gets heavier, and the younger chick is having a hard time as it high-steps through the freezing mixture of mud and slush.
The raptors' thighs and shins are in no danger of freezing because the blood vessels are arranged to save heat. Arteries with hot blood going down the legs pass alongside veins coming up from the feet carrying blood chilled by the cold ground. The heat is transferred from the descending hot flow to the ascending cold.
That way the upper legs don't get drained of body heat.
The foot tissue itself can operate at very low temperatures. It's a trick that the raptors' relatives, the birds, also have. But the belly tissue of the little chick has no such protection, and it's in imminent danger of frostbite.
The chick whines and stuffs its nose into Raptor Red's armpit. Raptor Red starts to worry. She realizes that the chick could die in another hour or so.
Raptor Red follows her sister as the visibility drops to zero in the swirling snow. The cold, heavy flakes whacking into her eyeballs makes Raptor Red close her eyelids so only a narrow slit remains to see through. Her sister goes up through a heavily wooded ridge and then stops when a heavy, pungent odor causes her nostrils to twitch. The smell is foreign - and warm.
Her sister growls under her breath
and advances through the dense conifer needles.
A strange noise comes from a crevice in the rocky ledge ahead. A pair of pale blue eyes stares out from the dark interior of a cavern.
Raptor Red and her sister advance side by side into the mouth of the hole. The blue eyes retreat.
Raptor Red feels the faint swoosh of air that a claw makes. She stoops, and a trio of long, straight claws just miss her head.
Only a moment passes, and then she hears her sister attack in the darkness. There's a heavy thumping noise. Then a screech.
Raptor Red Page 17
