Raptor Red Read online

  She has missed this type of contact terribly over the last few days. But she feels her skin flinch when it touches his. She doesn't like the way he presses his hide against her shoulder. It is a dishonest touch. Raptor Red stands still and makes a huge, sweeping bow - and at the bottom of her courtship curtsey, she sees the marks on the male's throat. SPOTS/ her brain screams. HE'S GOT SPOTS/ Raptor Red thrusts her snout under the tall male's chin. He pulls his head away, but not before Raptor Red gets a good look.

  Ticks - the red spots are ticks. Raptor Red knows well the telltale sign of parasite infestation. She was born with a horror of little red spots. She has seen raptor chicks and raptor adults slowly succumb to tick disease, losing vigor every day.

  She grabs the male's neck and looks very carefully. Small black dots are moving around inside the red marks.

  He's got bugs!

  Raptor Red jumps backward three steps, raises her head, and screams a mixture of threat and alarm. The male looks perplexed.

  She lunges at him with all six foreclaws slashing circles through the air.

  He gets the message. He slinks off into the darkness. In a few minutes his fading scent assures her that he's in full retreat.

  If Raptor Red's thoughts could be put into language, they'd be, Males are such liars. I'm a bit underweight - but I don't cover up my parasites. That bug-bitten loser is lucky I didn't slice him into little pieces.

  She goes back to her nest, fluffs up the bed of dry ferns, plops herself down, and nibbles furiously at an iguanodon leg she stored there. Then she goes to sleep.

  Raptor Red wakes up slowly, as is her custom. Before her conscious brain is alert, her senses have been scanning the air for sounds and smells. There are faint, distant scents from deinonychs and from some yellow-nosed raptors. And there is something else too, a scent that makes her eyes pop open. It's close and it's very familiar. It's almost like her mother's scent. Almost but not quite. But it's definitely Raptor Red-Kind scent.

  My kind... my family. The scent leads Raptor Red to a steep bank in a dried-up riverbed.

  Two tiny Utahraptors, only three weeks old, and an older chick stumble out from a burrow. They squeak and sniff at Raptor Red. She sniffs back. Their scent is like an imperfect memory of her own childhood. She cocks her head and stares. Her mother? Her father?

  Not father... not mother... but still part of myself - but less than half of me.

  No. The chicks aren't anyone she has met before. But Raptor Red's olfactory computer gives her a galvanic message: One half of one half....hese chicks are one half of one half of myself... They are my sister's children!

  Raptor Red backs up and sits down. The chicks approach with hesitating steps, sniffing, running back, coming forward, sniffing again. Their noses tell them this is their aunt.

  'SsssssSSSSSSSS.' A loud threat comes from the burrow. A big raptor head comes out, teeth bared. The head abruptly stops hissing.

  Raptor Red sniffs loudly. This scent jolts her brain. One half of me... this adult female is one half of me.

  I KNOW YOU!

  The last time she smelled this scent was three years ago, on a cold day in Canada, the last day she was with her siblings. Before she and her mate began their invasion of the new southern lands.

  Raptor Red dances a wild jig of greeting. She hops from one foot to another, going 'eeep-eeep-eeep' like an overgrown chick.

  It is her sister.

  Early the following morning, a one-ton iguanodon is making contented leaf-munching noises as she feeds on low-growing cycad fronds. She clomps down on the tough palmlike leaves with her sharp beak. The saw-edged beak tip slices easily through the tough plant tissue. Her tongue automatically rolls the bitten-off pieces into a ball that is coated with saliva. With a gentle, efficient rhythm the plant-balls are transferred rearward to the chewing compartment, the oral cavity between the massive rows of molar teeth.

  A low grinding sound, like a huge coffee mill, comes from within the iguanodon's cheeks. Twice a second the mighty molars come together. Twice a second the jagged edges of enamel from a hundred tightly packed teeth slide past each other, trapping plant parts and shredding them. Twice a minute the tongue balls up the ground mass of food and pushes it to the rear of the mouth. Once a minute a lump can be seen in the throat. The lump passes down toward the stomach in a slow, smooth movement.

  It's the finest vegetarian food-processor in the Early Cretaceous, a system that can start with dry, hard, dust-covered cycad foliage and convert it into easily digested plant pulp.

  The iguanodon has modest powers of self-awareness. She feels happy and complacent and content. She feels efficient, in a vague 'I'm doing what I should be doing and I'm doing it well' sort of way.

  Still the iguanodon is alert. Her sense of smell is superb. She keeps track of the rest of the herd a few hundred yards upwind. Her large, clear blue eyes sweep a full 360 degrees every second or two. Her eye sockets project outward from her forehead, like cow eyes or deer eyes, so right and left visual fields can cover a zone in front, to the side, and dead ahead.

  A faint crack in the bush makes her stop chewing.

  She focuses her eyes and ears forward. It's totally silent now. She can't detect a scent - the sound came from the left downwind. She starts backing away, toward her herd.

  There's another crack of dried twigs being stepped on.

  She hears a soft patter of feet on wet meadow, coming from the right, obliquely downwind, between herself and her herd. She tries to turn.

  Whummp! A half-ton weight, moving fast, hits her body high on the right side. She falls. Another heavy weight falls on her neck, pinning her to the ground.

  The two Utahraptors kill their victim efficiently, cleanly, with a flurry of slashes, hindclaws and fore-claws together.

  Raptor Red stands up and makes sure that the rest of the iguanodon herd isn't massing for a counterattack. Iguanodons sometimes charge a hundred strong and try to trample raptors.

  Not this time. A few iguanodons stand tall and sniff and stare. But then the herd begins to wander off in the opposite direction.

  Raptor Red's sister begins to remove meat and pieces of liver.

  The iguanodons' brains record the fact that a new hunting pack of Utahraptor is on the scene. Since a pack of two is ten times more dangerous than two independent raptors, the iguanodons will be extra cautious in the near future.

  In the evening Raptor Red huddles close to her sister's chicks, keeping them warm and dry in a den in the brush. Her sister sits up most of the night, alert, guarding her kin.

  The evening is unpleasant, with a light drizzle and enough breeze to make Raptor Red shiver now and then. But it doesn't matter. She's enjoying a sound she hasn't heard for a long time. Her sister's snoring.

  The youngsters and their mother fall asleep right away, aligned one next to another, heads and tails facing the same direction. Raptor Red lowers herself carefully between her sister and one of the youngsters, gently displacing the row of chicks. They make gurking noises but don't wake up. Raptor Red leans just a little bit against her sister's flank, which twitches several times. Her sister growls, opens one eye so she can see what woke her up, growls again, shifts her weight around, closes her eye tight, and resumes snoring.

  That's exactly the way Raptor Red remembers her.

  THE COMPUTER OF SISTERHOOD

  LATE MAY

  Scratch, scratch, wiggle, scratch, scratch.

  The Utahmptor chicks wake up scratching.

  Oooomph - skunsh - SCRATCH.

  Raptor Red and her sister wake up scratching too. The itchy feeling makes their spirits sag.

  Both adults know what they're scratching at.

  Ticks. Tiny green and brown ticks. Ticks that thrive in the underbrush made damp by spring rains. Ticks that have a narcotic saliva so they can bore a hole with their snout straight through a raptor's hide without the raptor knowing it. Ticks that are nearly impossible to scratch out once they have embedded themselves.

/>   The adult Utahraptors fear ticks more than an angry herd of iguanodons, because ticks cause pain and disease and death.

  Ordinarily the raptors would roll in soda mud to smother skin parasites. Back when she was growing up in Mongolia, Raptor Red followed her parents into a mud bath in a soda lake every other day in the spring. It usually worked adequately. The Mongolian ticks - most of them - would drop off after being coated in soda mud. Some would stay bored in, suck blood, drop off later on, and hatch their tick babies under a moist bush somewhere.

  The native Mongolian ticks rarely debilitated their raptor hosts. These Utah ticks are different. Their borings into the skin cause nasty swelling. When the raptors scratch with their paws or rub against a rough-barked tree, the swellings get much worse. The Utahraptor's internal defense - the immune system - seems unable to cope with the side effects of the Utah ticks.

  The two raptor sisters and the three chicks walk over to the iguanodon and eat their fill. The two adults fidget and scratch and look at all the low trees nearby. They want to find a very special little animal, the only species that raptors view as a friend.

  No luck. The pack wander over to the riverbank to drink. Raptor Red is much more nervous now than when she was alone. She is anxious for her sister's chicks. Built into her mental processes is a computer that evaluates kinship. Her eyes and ears and especially her nose can detect another raptor who is close kin. Every breath she takes in company with her sister affirms their close blood bond. Her subconscious computer has a hard-and-fast rule: Take care of your own chicks first; each one is one half of yourself. Take care of your sister's chicks next. Don't waste time on any other blood relative.

  Raptor Red has failed to bring her own chicks into the world, and so the strong hand of instinct encourages her to devote herself to her sister's chicks. Those chicks carry a share of her own genetic individuality. Saving her sister's chicks is saving herself.

  A gentle swirl of the water's surface betrays the presence of a four-foot-long crocodile, a Bernessartia. Too small to attack an adult raptor. But crocs are clever opportunists. As a chick, Raptor Red saw another sister disappear into a turbid Mongolian river, only to reappear minutes later in the jaws of a croc.

  Raptor Red splashes out a few yards and hisses at the croc, who submerges without a sound.

  The pack drinks. The chicks play, making too much noise for Raptor Red's peace of mind. They jump on Raptor Red's back, then jump down into the water where it is a foot deep, throwing up a muddy fountain.

  The adults have had enough. Raptor Red picks up one chick gently but firmly in her jaws and carries it back onto the meadow. Her sister picks up another. The third chick instantly loses its playful courage and darts back to the rest of the family.

  The crocodile lies motionless, five feet under the surface. She's neither angry nor afraid. She thinks her slow, repetitive croc-thoughts: Wait, wait, wait, wait. She's a perfectionist at waiting. She's only a tenth as heavy as Raptor Red, but she's much older - she hatched thirty-four years ago. And she's the best croc mother in all of Utah.

  Over the last twenty-two years she has successfully brooded twenty clutches of croc eggs, each with eight to twenty hatchlings. Two years were too dry to lay eggs. She's a fiercely protective croc mom - she's never hesitated to rush from the water, open mouthed, at any dinosaur or male croc that got too close to her progeny. This threat, accompanied by extravagant splashing, always worked.

  Now there are hundreds of adult or near-adult crocs in Utah who are her children. And there is even a brood of her grandchildren. Her croc genes will take over her species in the next dozen generations. She is a gold medalist in mothering.

  Crocodile motherhood depends on patience. The croc mother can wait two weeks for her next meal, because her metabolism per pound of her body weight is very low. She can stay underwater for an hour, not breathing, because she can shut down her internal metabolic furnace nearly completely. Her present wisdom comes from the slow, deliberate way the croc-race lives out its life-cycle.

  She grew very slowly, learning much every year, not reaching breeding size until she was twelve. The croc-mother wasn't rushed into adulthood the way the raptor sisters were. Their hot-blooded growth rate propelled them into sexual maturity at the age of four or five. They had to learn fast, take chances, and live in the metabolic fast lane.

  So the croc mother sits and waits and waits. Her tail tip is missing, and she has long scars across her back - reminders of her youth, when she tried to ambush dinosaurs too big to drag easily into the water. She hasn't made another such a mistake in a decade, and she never will. She'll die slowly of old age when she passes sixty, when thousands of her offspring will have colonized every river system in North America.

  When she dies, her bones will bleach to dust on a riverbank. But her multitude of progeny will spread and proliferate. Her genes will be carried in most crocodile species in the modern world.

  The raptor sisters pay no attention to the croc after she submerges. For them, out of sight is out of mind. The sisters look around again for that special friend in their environment - the friend that can help them with ticks.

  It's a lazy afternoon for the pack. They lie near the iguanodon, casually feeding now and then. The chicks chase each other in and out of the cavernous rib cage. They've been out of the nest, big enough to explore on their own, for only a couple of days, and they get bolder all the time, expanding the distance they dare to go from their mother. There is so much fresh iguanodon meat now that their sibling competition is temporarily suspended.

  Still the scratching and itching disturb Raptor Red's mood.

  Her sister squawks, stands, leans forward, and squawks again. It's a funny sound - loud, but not threatening.

  Raptor Red stands up too and squawks. The squawk is a rarely used signal. It means I'm here -1 won't bite - I'm here.

  A soft sound of feathered wings comes from the tops of some tall cycad trees. A bounding troop of sinorns, a Chinese bird species who invaded the Americas along with the raptors, flit down a few dozen feet in front of the raptor pack.

  Raptor Red is beside herself with excitement. She scrunches down, laying her head and neck along the meadow floor, trying to look as meek and non-threatening as she can. But she can't control her tail. Its stiff rear end twitches side to side. The sinorns take off immediately.

  Calm - calm - CALM! she thinks to herself. She closes her eyes. She focuses inward. Her breathing slows. Her tail stops twitching.

  The sinorns return - Raptor Red can hear them. They are very close. One of the birds pokes its snout up Raptor Red's nostril.

  Kah-SNEEEZE! She can't help herself. She opens her eyes - the birds are gone again.

  Calm... Calm...

  She lies motionless for two minutes. Then she feels what she's wanted all day - tiny bird feet walking up and down her back.

  She winces very slightly as a red-hot spark of pain comes from just behind her shoulders. Then another. Then two at once. But after each spike of pain comes a lingering warm feeling...ixture of throbbing blood flow and relief.

  The chicks watch the operation. They've never seen it before. A half-dozen sinorns are methodically surveying Raptor Red's back.

  Each bird stops every minute or so to reach down, carefully place its beak over a tick, and remove it with a twisting-backward head movement.

  The chicks charge the birds, hissing. Raptor Red's sister growls an authoritative rebuke. The chicks shrink back, and the birds return.

  For a wonderful hour the adult raptors get groomed and plucked and bitten and deticked. The sinorns even open the edges of the tick-induced wounds, nipping off infected skin. That really hurts, but the raptors endure it. They've been through it before. They know that a few days in the sun will heal the wounds with hardly a trace.

  Unfortunately, the chicks are too rambunctious to learn the joys of bird-grooming. When a sinorn alights on a chick's back, the chick tries to bite it. Raptor Red's sister has to interrupt
her grooming repeatedly to snarl menacingly at her offspring.

  It's too much for a mother to bear. Raptor Red's sister slowly rises, using smooth movements of legs and back so as not to scare the birds. She flicks out one long hand and flattens a chick to the ground.

  'Ghurk.' The chick gets the message. It lies still. The other chicks stare, speechless. They've never seen their mom so angry before.

  Thus the chicks learn, reluctantly, to sit still while being serviced by tick-birds. In Raptor Red's mind, this meadow will always be associated with healing ministrations from the sinorns. 'Tick-Bird Meadow' is a good translation of how her memory labels the locale.

  'Mmmmm' - Raptor Red and her sister hum inaud-ibly to themselves, as if to say, This is the life - now it's very fine. The afternoon is unusually warm and dry, with no thundershowers. The tick wounds feel much better already. All five raptors are stuffed with fresh meat. Best of all for the two adult females, the chicks' bellies are so distended with oversize portions of iguanodon that they can't walk, so they can't get into any mischief.