Raptor Red can smell blood. It's her sister's. But she can't see a thing in the cave.
She sniffs and slowly walks farther into the darkness. It's very quiet. She bumps into something inert, a big lifeless body that smells of earth and conifer roots. Her sister is already chewing on the strange carcass.
The morning breaks cold but clear. Warm red light seeps into the cave. Raptor Red wakes up and checks on the chicks. They're both still snoring little raptor snorts, half buried in a nest of conifer bark.
Her sister is already up and out and feeding on the dead segnosaur carcass.
Raptor Red comes out to investigate. The segnosaur has a smell totally foreign to the raptor's olfactory memory bank. And its shape is bizarre. The long neck and small head with weak teeth are like an ostrich dino's. But the awkward-looking body with wide, spreading hindfeet is thoroughly un-ostrich-dino. And the hands - the hands have huge, straight claws for digging.
The cave is the segnosaur's home. It dug out an elaborate tunnel system to escape the worst of the snowy weather. Segnos are the only dino family specialized for major excavation. Right now, in the
Early Cretaceous, segnos are montane rarities -species that can be found only at high altitudes. This mountain-loving habit has kept them from meeting the normal inhabitants of the lowlands, like Utahraptor.
Raptor Red's family has no experience to guide them in dealing with segnos, and no instinct either. Segno front claws are dangerous slashing weapons - Raptor Red's sister was very lucky.
Raptor Red gives the segno's body a thorough sniff-search and visual examination. Her olfactory inventory doesn't detect any sign of poison. She takes a bite of the liver that her sister has dragged out of the carcass.
Raptor Red notices her sister's wound: a deep gash over the waist, just in front of the left hip. When her sister shifts her weight, the wound bleeds.
The cave proves to be a splendid lair for the raptor clan. The two adults can go out hunting whenever it's sunny - and that's every other day or so. And whenever the snow begins again, the four raptors can snuggle in the bark bedding that the segnosaur had gathered.
Raptor Red is aware that her sister walks with a limp. The wound has scabbed over, but Raptor Red can see that it still causes pain. Her sister refuses to stay in the cave to let the wound heal and insists on going on every hunt.
Raptor Red worries about her sibling. She hasn't seen her injured before, and it changes her attitude toward her own responsibility in life. Raptor Red takes on more of the maternal duties - grooming the chicks, making sure that they don't fight too much over food brought in for them. It's not that the chicks are especially lovable now - just the reverse. At this stage in her development, the older chick is just adult enough to be obnoxious and irritating. She can run around as fast as Raptor Red, but her mind is still a chick's half the time. She has no sense of how serious life is, how dangerous it can be.
The older chick constantly teases the younger chick. And both chicks tease the adults, nipping at tails and screeching.
In raptor years the older chick is a teenager, that time when physical energy far exceeds common sense.
The mountain fauna is full of many surprises. The dactyls are different here, smaller and faster on the wing. There are more birds. There are exotic dinosaur species - and some of them are dangerous. The scent-signals are hard for Raptor Red to decipher. There is raptor sign in many places - from deinonychs and Utahraptors - but the identity of the dung-signers is hard to read because the cold nights freeze the dung-marks, erasing much of the information.
Raptor Red and her sister leave their marks on tree trunks: they place a dung-sign at the base, then reach as high as they can and scratch long wounds in the bark with their foreclaws.
Any other raptor can read the message: We're Utahraptor sisters, and we're this tall, so keep away!
At the beginning of their second month on the mountain, Raptor Red notices a new and strange behavior being practiced by her sister. It starts with her sister snuffling the soil with intense olfactory energy, then stamping her foot, growling, pawing dirt over a spot on the ground, and running.
Raptor Red has been assuming that it's a danger sign and has been running off with her sister every time. But the sixth time her sister repeats the performance, Raptor Red gets suspicious. Instead of running away, she goes back to the spot where her sister pawed the earth.
Despite her sister's growls, Raptor Red sniff-searches the area. There's a lingering scent, a familiar one. She claws the earth, overturning the sod and releasing more aroma.
It's male Utahraptor sign - her male consort!
Raptor Red claws the ground furiously and reply-marks the spot with her dung-sign. Then she glares at her sister, who has assumed a nonchalant posture and refuses to make eye contact. She tries to look busy scanning the meadow ahead for imaginary iguanodon herds.
If raptors had complex facial muscles, her sister would be wearing a sheepish expression.
Raptor Red charges and bumps her sister so hard on the rump that both of them tumble head over tail. For the rest of the day, Raptor Red ignores her sister, refusing to return head-bobs or muzzle-rubs.
It's not the last time Raptor Red finds fresh sign from her young male on the ground and in the bark of trees.
'Eeeep ... ssssswsh ... bmp-bmp-bmpity-bmp.'
It's a sound Raptor Red hasn't heard before, ever.
'Eeeeeeeep ... sssssssswsh.'
They're squeals of delight, like a raptor chick playing with its mother's tail, but even higher-pitched.
'Eeeeepó' BUMP!
Something alive, something tiny - something is playing over there beyond the pine trees, where the ground slopes away for a hundred yards.
Raptor Red glances at her sister. She has a very curious expression on her face. Not a snarl, or a look of fear, or even an appearance of perplexity. Something else.
Her sister gets up from where the pack has been resting in front of the cave and walks quickly toward the noise. Raptor Red follows.
A iguanodon-herd path snakes through the trees, making a tunnel seven feet tall and three feet wide, where the underbrush has been beaten down by countless generations of herbivore hooves. Ordinarily raptors are cautious when they negotiate this passage - there's always the danger of meeting a rogue bull iguanodon. But now Raptor Red watches her sister bound through the opening and disappear.
Carefully, pausing at each step, Raptor Red goes through the tunnel. She hates this place. It gives her a weird feeling.
Noises come from the other end of the tunnel -shrill, scary, unnatural calls, vaguely like her sister's victory whoop but distorted.
Raptor Red is afraid some horrible herbivore is trampling her sibling slowly, causing inconceivable pain. She stands still for a moment, gathering her courage, and plunges out of the passage into the open space beyond.
And there she's struck dumb by the extraordinary sight.
'EEEEEEEP... whoopwhoop-whoooop!'
Her sister is sliding down the snowy slope on her back, gurgling and calling like a maniac. She lands at the base of the slope and continues to scoot across the meadow, coming to rest in a mound of crushed saplings. 'Eeeeeep!' Still upside down and lacking any shred of raptor dignity, she calls to Raptor Red.
'Eeep.' Raptor Red makes a weak reply. What is she doing? She begins to suspect her sibling has caught the 'mad raptor disease,' a malady that makes carnivorous dinosaurs run in circles, growling at themselves, until they fall over.
There's a flurry of movement at the top of the slope. Raptor Red's sister isn't the only predator enjoying the snow slide. A troop of tro-odonts, small raptorlike meat-eaters about forty pounds in weight, are running up to the edge, jumping into the air, and landing on their backsides.
Tro-odonts are slender-snouted bug-eaters and chasers of small furballs. Raptor Red has always ignored them. They pose no danger to raptor chicks, and no competition for game.
'Eeeeep ... eeeeep ... eeeeeep.'
It's the tro-odonts who are emitting the high-pitched calls Raptor Red heard before she came through the trees.
Her sister flips herself over onto her feet and starts climbing the slope, her hand claws slipping every other step. She's still making manic gurgling noises. When she reaches the top, she makes a bobbing gesture to the tro-odonts.
They look nervous, back away, but then they bob back. Some parts of carnivore body-language are universal. The bob is understood by most species. It means Let's play!
Raptor Red's sister looks down the slope, flexes her knees and ankles, makes a half-turn sideways, blinks twice at Raptor Red, and does a partial somersault.
'EEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!' Down the slope she goes, spinning slowly like a Utahmptor top. She rams into a ridge of mud, bounces once, and slides into an arroyo, where her body disappears into a four-foot-deep snowdrift.
My sister is playing - playing. It takes a while for Raptor Red to comprehend the scene.
Sister - playful. The concepts don't go together.
Raptor Red thought she knew all her sister's moods. But here's a side of her character that was hidden away, a little secret looniness. It's something her sister must have learned when she was alone, before her chicks were born.
Her sister's nose pops up from the snowdrift, followed by her hands and feet. She makes her way awkwardly to where Raptor Red is sitting.
Raptor Red feels her chest being rammed by her sister's forehead. She isn't sure what the proper response would be. She feels the two chicks huddling behind her thighs. Clearly they don't understand their mother right now either.
Her sister picks up the younger chick and swings it over the edge of the slope. Down it goes, followed by its mother. A dozen tro-odonts are sliding down twenty feet away. The air is filled with 'eeeps!' spanning four octaves.
It does look like fun, Raptor Red thinks. The younger chick's fear gives way to childish pleasure. It scrambles to the top again, jumping up and down impishly. Raptor Red's sister returns and whacks Raptor Red hard on the rump.
I'll try it. Raptor Red looks out over the slope, now churned into a low-viscosity mixture of red mud and slush. She grips the edge with her hindclaws, lowers her body, andó
Whump! She's shoved by her sister and falls on her side. The mud-slush feels smooth as Raptor Red goes downhill. She rolls on her back and is surprised how trees look when seen from this position.
It's an exhilarating, scary, strange, fast, spinning, upside-down feeling.
She likes it.
WHIP-TAIL
MARCH
It is a very windy day when the raptor pack meets the whip-tail brontosaur. Whenever the dark clots of clouds block the solar heat, the air becomes chilly and inhospitable. The air is clear and bright, and as long as they stay in the sun, the raptor sisters feel comfortable.
The raptors see the whip-tail from two miles away - a dark mass moving alone in a mountain meadow. They try to sniff out some target data -Who is this potential prey? Is it too strong for an attack? Is it injured?
The scent that wafts up from the whip-tail makes Raptor Red pause. It is like Astrodon scent - but, on the other hand, it isn't. Raptor Red knows only one kind of brontosaurian - Astrodon itself - and she knows how to attack these immense vegetarians. If that were an astrodon down there, she and her sister could probably handle it.
But the scent tells her to be careful, to expect something new. That is an unknown Astrodon variation.
As she stands on tiptoes, trying to get a better look, she becomes aware that she is alone. Her sister has already gone downhill to begin the attack.
Raptor Red has a bad feeling about this attack. She screeches a short alarm that says, Wait - wait for me. But her sister doesn't wait.
Raptor Red bounds down the hill to catch up.
When Raptor Red sees the whip-tail up close through the shrubs, the big dino is staring right back at her. Raptor Red doesn't like this at all. It's a universal rule: Predators of all ages are naturally suspicious of prey who don't appear to be scared. Self-confident prey are often those who have extra skill and strength in defense.
Clearly the whip-tail is not rattled by the prospect of battling two Utahraptors. It sees Raptor Red's sister and swivels its head back and forth, keeping track of both raptors.
The whip-tail moves deliberately out away from the treeline, toward the middle of the open meadow, where fresh snow covers the tops of ferns and conifer seedlings.
Raptor Red feels even more uneasy. The whip-tail seems to be setting up a defense that the raptors haven't seen before.
Raptor Red gives a low gurgling call to her sister, who looks back briefly, then circles around the far side of the whip-tail. The older chick stands trembling next to Raptor Red, afraid to join her mother, afraid to stay.
The whip-tail makes a quarter-turn so its shoulders are facing away from Raptor Red and its broadside is opposite her sister. At a sudden zipping sound, Raptor Red ducks instinctively. A conifer branch five feet above her nose is severed from its trunk and falls heavily on top of Raptor Red's back. The older chick crouches in terror.
Raptor Red recoils, jumping backward. What was THAT? her brain demands of her senses. Let's get out of here - there are plenty of iguanodons to hunt - let's leave this strange monster alone.
But before she can run away, Raptor Red sees a blur of tough, flexible tissue whizzing just inches above her eyes. A slab of bark is loosened from a thick conifer trunk and slides down to the ground.
The whip-tail has moved backward, closing the distance between itself and Raptor Red. It's whooshing its tail back and forth, holding the twenty-foot-long tip high off the ground. Raptor Red recognizes the tail as the deadly weapon that is cutting branches off trees.
The whip-tail has muscles of exceptional power in the base of the tail, just aft of its hips. When these muscles twitch, the wave of contractile force passes down the tail, out to the thin whiplash tip, amplifying the movement. Just a few degrees of flexure at the rump become a twenty-foot arc at the tail extremity.
It's a great weapon for hitting targets far from the whip-tail's torso. The tail tip can travel at hundreds of miles an hour, and when it hits a predator's body, the kinetic energy will cut flesh and stun limb joints.
This whip-defense gave the whip-tail clan great success in their evolutionary past. Now they're reduced to scattered remnant populations, their ancestral dynasty ruined by immigrant disease. But as individuals, the whip-tails are still the most dangerous herbivores ever to face a dino-predator.
Raptor Red grew up in environments devoid of whip-tails, and her species has no hardwired mode of behavior to deal with their tail-defense.
Wise predators are not reckless. Predators who live long and raise many chicks are not bombastic fools who rush into every dangerous situation. Evolution has not favored raptor genes that give their owners bravado.
To be a Darwinian success, it's absolutely necessary to know when to run away.
And Raptor Red knows it's running-away time right now. She can't figure out the tail-defense and doesn't want to hang around until she does.
Her sister has reached the same conclusion. She's skulking back up the wooded slope, head down, mostly hidden in the underbrush.
The raptor sisters are halfway up the slope when they hear a high-pitched alarm call. They stop dead in their tracks and turn around.
'Screeeeeeeee!' It's a Utahraptor, and it's a chick.
The raptor sisters stand as tall as they can and look down. The giant whip-tail has followed them to the base of the slope. The older chick is still on the other side of the meadow, separated from Raptor Red and her sister by the whip-tail.
Raptor Red sees the chick zigzagging in panic, trying to get past the whip-tail. A quick flip of the whip-tail's whip, and the chick falls over, then gets up.
Dumb, dumb chick, Raptor Red says to herself. Go the other way, go around.
But the chick tries to come straight up the slope, ducking low to avo
id the whip-tail. The giant vegetarian moves sideways with surprising agility and flicks its tail tip at the chick.
A long line of snow explodes just short of the chick, showing that the whip-tail missed by inches.
'SCREEEEEE!" Raptor Red flinches at the ear-splitting call of anger emitted by her sister. She watches in horror as her sister goes flying down the slope directly at the whip-tail.
Don't DO that, Raptor Red thinks.
The whip-tail backs off. Maybe my sister was right, Raptor Red thinks. She starts down the slope to join the attack.
The chick, befuddled by fear, runs in circles behind the whip-tail.
Raptor Red Page 18
