Raptor Red Read online

  For her first two and a half years, all her loyalty was to those who were 'half of me.' For all this time Raptor Red would flee any Utahraptor who did not smell like family. She joined her parents in hissing at strangers.

  She and her sister would chase away chicks from neighboring packs when they got too close.

  Family was everything - until the young male came, a stranger who courted her. Raptor Red felt her fear of foreigners melt away as she watched him perform the courtship ritual. He smelled completely un-family - 'not part of me.' And she knew that was right for her mate.

  She had been adult in body form, full grown, for five years when she and her mate attacked the astro on the Utah floodplain. They had been mated for three years. But prey had been so scarce each breeding season that the pair did not dare to produce chicks.

  Now as she sits in the mud next to her dead mate and the enormous inert hulk of the Astrodon, she experiences feelings that are new: despair and loneliness. Raptors are social beings. They need the companionship of their own kind. They feel a deadly unease when alone.

  And there is a form of sorrow, She doesn't eat any part of the dead Astrodon. But she does stay next to the crumpled body of her mate for thirty-six hours. On the morning of the second day, huge, sickle-shaped shadows pass over her body. Instinctively she looks up and hisses loudly.

  Shadows like these generated her first sensation of fear when she was a chick. She didn't have to learn to hate shadows from the sky. Nearly all dinosaurs are born with the same preprogrammed response. Those that are unfortunate enough to hatch with a mutant gene that eliminates the shadow-fear don't survive longer than a week. They are snatched from the nest by jaws from the sky.

  Raptor Red hisses again, flexes her legs, and leaps as high as she can, her jaws snapping shut three times in rapid-fire succession. The dactyl leaves.

  Another dactyl, younger and more foolish, soars in low, behind the raptor's back, and stabs at her with his spike-toothed jaws.

  She jumps. Tiny dots of red show where the dactyl teeth pricked her. One dactyl she can handle. But the sight of the dead Astrodon is a visual lure attracting six, then twelve, then two dozen of the aerial monsters with twenty-foot wingspans. All are young, hungry, and overconfident.

  The dactyls, a species of Ornithocheirus, are beautiful. All their undersurfaces are brilliant shades of pale brown and white. The noontime sunlight makes their body covering of fine, hairlike scales glisten. Iridescent green marks the beaks of the males; blue denotes the females.

  Their long, narrow, recurved wings are under the control of an exquisite apparatus of tendons, ligaments, skin, and muscle. Slight twitches of thigh and knee adjust the tension of the wing membrane held between forelimb and hindlimb. Leading-edge flaps, moved by a special pronglike bone attached to the wrist, are constantly expanding and contracting to maximize the efficiency of airflow over the wing.

  Even when the dactyls fly so slowly that it seems impossible they could stay aloft, the wing machinery works flawlessly. When airspeed falls as a dactyl goes into a slow climb, the wrist bones open up a slot in the leading edge, letting some of the air rush through the hole and preventing a stall that would cause the wing to lose its lift.

  His weak sense of smell will not tell him who the winged victim is. But he must know. The lone dactyl makes a swooping pass at the mangled remains on the ground, and then he sees, in his peripheral vision, a bit of blue on what seems to be a head lying near the astro. The young male sees the identification marks on the head, and he knows the truth. His mate is gone, her body dismembered.

  For four days Raptor Red travels during all the daylight hours, walking morning and afternoon, avoiding the midday heat. During the nights she crouches under the upturned roots of fallen trees. Even though the days are hot, she shivers most evenings. It rains just before sundown every day. The nighttime wind blowing across her rain-wet hide sucks out her body heat at a terrible rate.

  But the metabolic furnace within her body is up to the thermal challenge. Waves of shivering spread through her muscles, and her heat production goes up by another factor of four, keeping all her vital organs at an optimum temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Still, shivering eats up heat calories so fast that by day two of her trek, Raptor Red is ravenously hungry. She has to find meat - fuel for her hot-blooded body. She sniffs along the fern-tangled bank of a creek, now swollen with rainwater. She has learned from experience that meaty tidbits can be found washed up in just such locales.

  She thrusts her snout into a clump of horsetail reeds.

  'Yeech!' Her olfactory chambers are choked by the suffocating aroma of half-rotten lungfish.

  More carefully now, she investigates the three-hundred-pound fish. Only half is totally disgusting. The rear half is edible. She cuts the offending front end off with her sharp foreclaws.

  Gulp-chunk-chug. A hundred pounds of fish disappear down her gullet.

  An hour later her careful streamside search is rewarded again: a dead turtle, twenty-five pounds, with its head bitten off - probably by a crocodile. One gulp and it's gone, shell and all.

  Raptors evolved as group hunters of big game. Raptor Red killed dozens of multi-ton dinosaurs when she hunted as part of a pair, first with a sibling, later with her mate. But evolution rewards flexibility too. A lone raptor is like a lone wolf...eat-eater who must be able to forage for small fry.

  Raptor Red is surviving by herself, picking through the zoological garbage thrown up by the overflowing creek. She's lucky. It's an unusually wet spring. The turbid mixing of river, pond, and stream waters carries a rich hoard of dead and dying aquatic creatures. Her powerful olfactory sense serves her well in discovering carrion treasures hidden in places even the keenest eyes would never discover.

  Raptor Red realizes that she is now following a faint scent-trail. Her olfactory nerves can just barely detect the presence, far upstream, of warm dinosaur bodies - raptor bodies - and the prospect of rejoining her own kind raises her spirits.

  As she climbs over a logjam of conifer trunks, she stops and stares and sniffs, raises her snout as high as it will go, sniffs again loudly, and stares.

  There are raptors, five of them, three hundred yards away.

  But something is wrong. She gets a big dose of scent, and her olfactory nerves are overwhelmed with biochemical clues. Raptor scent, definitely. But her brain evaluates the scent-rich air and concludes: Raptors - but not MY KIND!

  She's suddenly angry and afraid, confronted by a raptor so close to her own scent and yet so distinctly wrong.

  Two of the foreign raptors approach slowly, holding their heads low in a submissive, non-threatening posture.

  She sniffs loudly. These are not small raptors. Too big to be Deinonychus, and the scent is wrong for Deinonychus.

  Now she senses maleness in the two approaching raptors. They bob their heads in a greeting that's almost like the way her mate used to greet her.

  But there's something wrong in their head-bobbing dance too. These foreign males don't do it right, and their flawed choreography makes her even more agitated.

  My kind... not my kind... Her brain struggles with the mixed signals.

  Now she can see the color band on their snouts. It's not red. It's yellow. She has never been with a family member with a yellow snout patch.

  She thinks to herself. Images of self-recognition express, My kind, red snout - my kind, Raptor - Red.

  HsssscreeeeEEEEEEECH!!!!

  Her brain can't stand it anymore. She attacks, making huge deadly arcs with her deadliest claw.

  She kicks up dust. She swooshes her tail from side to side.

  The two foreign males freeze for a second, then bound away in full-speed retreat.

  Then Raptor Red turns and runs away too.

  She has no conscious way of understanding what has just happened. Deep inside her brain, the thought of being courted by Yellow Snouts is hateful.

  The most important task she has had to per
form, all through her life, ever since hatching, has been to identify 'my kind.' To Raptor Red, the Yellow Snouts are hideous liars and impostors. They have most of the correct signals for 'my kind,' yet they distort proper Utahraptor language and use foreign movements, and they give out the wrong scent.

  Raptor Red snarls to herself, paces back and forth, and flexes her killing-claw in angry spasms. She's sure she has saved herself from some hideous, unknown fate. And she has. If she had mated with a Yellow Snout, he would have abandoned her. And she would have been cursed with chicks born dead or deformed or sterile.

  Raptor Red doesn't know that this hatred is what has kept her species alive. It's her hate of Yellow Snouts that protects her own reproductive hopes. Any Red Snout attracted to a Yellow Snout mate would condemn her own genes to death. The hybrid chicks would never survive to a healthy adulthood. Natural selection has to be ruthless - genes that encourage such lethal unions are weeded out by death and infertility.

  Raptor Red's inborn horror of Yellow Snouts is reinforced by dim memories from childhood. She saw her kind, her parents, drive them away. Back in her homeland in Asia, Yellow Snouts were distant neighbors who hunted in the densely forested highlands. Raptor Red's species preferred the more open low country. When members of the two species met, they fled, or they attacked.

  Even when she was a chick, Raptor Red's nose told her that Yellow Snouts were almost 'my kind.' Her nose told the truth. Yellow Snouts are her ancestors.

  Fifty thousand years before, the two species had been one and the same, a mountain-loving yellow-muzzled predator. Yellow Snouts kept to the ancestral habitats of dense forests, but a small part of the ancestral population became isolated on the far side of a huge river. That small population evolved different hunting techniques, different recognition colors, and different courtship colors. It became a new Utahraptor species, Raptor Red's species.

  When the red-snouted Utahraptors finally met their yellow-snouted kin, their genes could no longer mix.

  Raptor Red's species is lucky to be alive. New species are evolutionary experiments that usually turn out to be inferior to the parent species. And parent species usually exterminate their daughters.

  But not the Red Snouts. Their adaptive equipment proved superior to their ancestor's, and when the two met, Red Snouts usually pushed out Yellow Snouts, the daughter species exterminating the parent species like Darwinian Lizzie Bordens.

  Here and there the two can coexist, wherever especially dense cover permits the Yellow Snouts to escape their more aggressive red-snouted kin.

  Raptor Red moves away at a quick pace, still agitated from her meeting with her near relations. If she were with her family, she'd attack. But she's alone, and she wants to get away, so she descends into a low series of dry lake beds that offer ground more to her liking than the coniferous woodland where the Yellow Snout pack is staking out their hunting territory.

  Here she stays for a week. She is searching for a Utahraptor of her kind.

  TOO SKINNY FOR PARENTHOOD (AND TOO FULL OF TICKS)

  MAY

  Raptor Red knows she's too skinny. She looks at her thigh, pokes at it with her snout, and looks again. It's muscular but very lean. Two weeks on her own have been hard on her diet. A single Utahraptor is not an efficient predator, and she has subsisted on the equivalent of raptor finger food...ead croc here, a half-decayed lungfish there, a dried-up iguanodon carcass in between.

  Male Utahraptors prefer plump, well-fed females.

  Raptor Red doesn't think this through. She doesn't have to. She was born with the same mate-search image that males of her species have. Her genes encode high standards, and in her first breeding season she sought a tall male filled out with muscle. All the young unattached females looked for the strongest males with the plumpest thighs.

  Raptor Red's mother was a well-muscled raptor too, and this image reinforced the inborn standard of Utahraptor beauty.

  Plump thighs are an outward sign of good hunters and good genes. Since father and mother Utahraptors share the burden of nest-making and chick-feeding nearly equally, young males and females scrutinize every potential mate. Skepticism rules courtship. Toward each potential mate, the undercurrent of thought in Raptor Red's mind was I'll risk myself in reproduction with you only if you can convince me that you're healthy, smart, and trustworthy. Raptor Red didn't give even a second look to scrawny males during that first courtship season. But when a thickly muscled male bounced over to her and initiated a most vigorous mating dance, her courtship incredulity was overcome.

  Now she's lost her mate, and she's skinny. Too skinny, she suspects, to be attractive.

  She nuzzles the base of her tail. It's also too thin. Males and females check out each other's tails carefully during courtship - the tail base is supposed to be plump and well filled out, with fat layers over the muscle. When a raptor isn't eating well, the tail fat is the first layer to disappear.

  Raptor Red stares hard at a crimson spot she sees near the tip of her tail. This spot is even more worrisome. Persistent wounds, even little ones, automatically disqualify a raptor from the ranks of the most desirable. She scrapes at the mark with her foreclaws, then licks it. It's not a scab - just a bit of dried lungfish meat that got stuck to her skin at her last meal.

  Raptor Red carries out her sign-marking chores in the final minutes of daylight. She finds a suitable tree, tall, straight, with a thick trunk. She reaches high and scratches long claw marks on the bark, releasing sweet-smelling sap. Then she rubs her throat on the tree, leaving her telltale signature from glands on the underside of her jaws.

  She pauses and adds the strongest signal of her gender and species...ung pile. No raptor of the wrong species will miss the message now: I'm an adult Utahraptor of the Red Snout species. If you're a healthy Red Snout male, consider ME. All others, LEAVE ME ALONE!

  That's all she can do now. The evening breeze will carry the scent-marks to any red-snouted Utahraptor within a five-mile radius. She has advertised her-self. Now she must wait.

  The sunset is glorious, illuminating Raptor Red's temporary nest with crimson and turning the dried bracken into incandescent lace. She's feeling better. Beautiful colors always lift her spirits. She begins to I drift off to sleep.

  Bing. A little alarm bell goes off in her head, triggered by her olfactory sense. A stream of molecules has entered her nostrils and hit special sensors inside her muzzle.

  Bing - wake up - bing - male alert - male alert.

  Raptor Red jumps to her feet, every muscle tensed. She sniffs deeply at the evening air. Yes, that's male scent, and it's her species. She raises her body and weaves her head back and forth, staring upwind. There is somebody out there.

  'Snff... snff... SNFFFF!' Utahraptor male. 'SNFFFF!' Red Snout. My kind.

  A tall figure walks out of the shadows, walking with exaggerated strides. His head dips down and up in a deep bow. Raptor Red dips her head just a bit. She's hopeful - but suspicious. Raptor courtships are supposed to begin in the morning and go on all day, to give both sides ample opportunity to evaluate every move, every body part, every scent. She's lonely and unhappy with her lot as a single hunter. But she's not desperate.

  'Snff!' Good. He's Red Snout, but not close kin. Her scent-evaluation centers automatically go through their checklist. Raptor Red's instincts won't let her accept courtship from family.

  The male moves closer, bowing every few steps. Raptor Red moves out away from the bracken and into a little clearing where she can see better. The tall male comes to the edge of the open space but then stops. His graceful bows become awkward.

  Raptor Red's heart sinks. She begins to think that the tall male is hiding something. If he followed the rules, he'd come up close.

  She stamps her left foot: 'GrrrrrKK!'

  He stops, bows, and takes a half step. Raptor Red sees his body contours highlighted by the warm afterglow of the sun. He is very tall - and muscular too. She's beginning to hope that he's just shy.

 
; They circle each other. Raptor Red becomes defensive - she thinks he's staring at her thin tail. And he is. He backs away, forcing her to follow and take the initiative in the dance.

  Don't go away - don't go away - don't go away, Raptor Red thinks as she tries her hardest to appear graceful and strong and healthy.

  The male turns broadside to her, a gesture that conveys indecision.

  Raptor Red begins to feel uneasy about some of the male's moves. He's rushing the courtship preliminaries, violating Utahraptor etiquette. Now he walks beside her and tries to place his flank against hers. It's a clumsy attempt to apply the leaning gesture, where one raptor applies gentle pressure through its torso and the other raptor is supposed to respond with a slight push in the opposite , direction.

  It's an intimate form of physical contact, usually reserved for raptor pairs who know and trust each other. Raptor Red used to spend hours leaning against her sister when they were youngsters, and she and her mate enjoyed the lean in the early evening, after they had hunted and fed together.