Raptor Red Read online

The two raptor sisters swim for three hours. It's actually not difficult. They keep just enough speed beyond the current to navigate easily. Other raptors will exhaust themselves fighting the current. They'll give up and float helplessly. And they'll be drowned when they get entangled in fallen foliage or swept up in whirlpools.

  A tall, dark massive grove of centuries-old conifer trees looms up on the right. Raptor Red's sister turns toward them. Raptor Red follows close behind.

  They bump into the fallen trunks of smaller trees, and Raptor Red feels her knees get bruised and bumped and bruised again. She grabs at a low-hanging branch, digging her foreclaws deep into the bark. This brings relief - the current is gentle. Raptor Red could hang on for hours.

  But her sister goes on, swimming in between the biggest, oldest trunks. Reluctantly, Raptor Red lets go and follows. In a few minutes that branch will be under water.

  At last her sister stops at the base of a huge tree. Its trunk slants at a forty-degree angle; its top is jammed into the crowns of six other big trees. It has half fallen down, but it doesn't look like it will fall further that night.

  Raptor Red's sister reaches up with both hands, grabbing the bark. Then she flexes her hips down with a quick, powerful jerk. Her two hindlegs grab the trunk underwater. She moves her right leg up and grabs the bark opposite her right hand. Then she repeats the operation with the left hindleg. Then she shifts her right hand up - then the right hindleg.

  Slowly, very deliberately, with great strength and slow coordination, she climbs the sloping trunk. Ten feet, twenty feet. She stops when she reaches the crown, where a maze of branches extend at right angles to the trunk. There are already some flood refugees wedged up there. A half-grown Yellow Snout raptor glares balefully at her. Raptor Red's sister extends her head, opens her mouth, and utters a very low snarl.

  The Yellow Snout falls backward but catches himself in the crown of another tree.

  Raptor Red has watched her sister's climb in amazement. She had no idea that Utahraptor bodies were capable of climbing. Last year she chased some

  Deinonycus, the smaller raptor species, up trees and saw them ascend beyond her reach. She hadn't attempted to follow.

  Raptor Red is not too proud to learn by example. If her sister can climb that high with chicks hanging on, so can she.

  Raptor Red grabs the bark with her foreclaws. The bark is surprisingly hard, and her claws slip off. She grabs again, piercing the bark with the sharp claw tips. She uses her instinctive style of claw-work, the style she uses when she attacks a thick-hided astro. Her finger-tendons flex at maximum power. The claw tips dig deeper. They hold.

  She places the sole of her right hindfoot against the tree trunk, flexing her rear toe so the claw grabs into the bark. Her killing claw too now becomes a strong climbing apparatus. Digging the killing claw into the tree is a lot like slashing through the skin of a big iguanodon - except in climbing the motion is much slower and more carefully controlled.

  Instinct and intelligence work together to make Raptor Red a tree-climber. Climbing is not really new for her. She's climbed up the hulking carcasses of astros on several occasions. She's climbed up the backs and necks of live cow iguanodons a dozen times. Climbing this tree really isn't more difficult. The tree doesn't try to shake her off, the way a struggling prey-victim might.

  Raptor Red thinks through every step. She modifies her instinctive attack movements so that they keep her securely on the tree, going upward. Utah-raptors are too big to be regular climbers. Nature imposes strict rules of engineering. The bigger the animal, the tougher it is to move vertically.

  A Utahraptor, weighing five hundred pounds as an adult, isn't born with the confidence to climb. But it can be learned. Raptor Red is learning this night.

  Raptor Red reaches her sister. The raptor pack huddles closely, hanging on to each other and to the branches. When their claws cut the young branches, their nostrils sting with the smell of poisonous sap. Raptor Red feels the tree swaying and shuddering as fallen logs wash against the base of the trunk. The water is still rising. The moon is blocked by heavy clouds, and the rains have spread from the western hills to directly overhead.

  Raptor Red is cold.

  The sun finally breaks through after thirty-six hours of rain. The Yellow Snout raptor's grip was loosened by the chilling breeze. He fell and was drowned. Raptor Red heard other creatures - she couldn't identify the species - fall too. Most were small. Some were pushed off their branches by newcomers who were stronger and meaner. Two or three were large and made loud splashes when they hit the water. There were screams and hisses too, marking fights for the safest perches.

  Raptor Red and her sister move their bodies to get the benefit of the sun's warmth. The chicks are fine - all through the day and a half of rain, they kept themselves stuck under the adults. The soft, thin belly skin of Raptor Red and her sister kept the chicks warm.

  The tree crown comes alive with animals stretching their joints. Fingers and toes that had been tightly clenched for so many hours are painfully, slowly extended and flexed and extended. Species who are mortal enemies on the ground are side by side now. But the predators are too chilled, too shaken to resume killing.

  Raptor Red sees something moving below that appears to be half-turtle, half-crocodile, half-iguanodon. She's never seen anything like it. It's about forty pounds, its back covered with armor plate, its sides studded with bony spikes. Its long tail ends in a small club of bone. Even its upper eyelids are armored.

  Raptor Red reaches down to sniff - her curiosity makes her forget the rainy ordeal.

  She can just touch the strange armored animal with her left foot. She extends her toes and gives it a shove.

  Wham-thwack-thwack-thwacky-thwack!

  She pulls her foot up just before the beast flails its spike-edged tail convulsively. Branches break, and the armored beast falls ten feet onto a soft, soggy mound of conifer needles.

  Whacky-thwack! Another convulsion. The beast falls again, onto a tangle of flotsam and jetsam.

  It's a baby Gastonia, an armored dinosaur. Raptor Red has never seen one before.

  The sun gets very hot. Raptor Red can see dry ground not far away - it will be an easy swim once she has warmed up a bit.

  Other dinosaurs are sunning themselves too, in preparation for their descent. In a few hours the flood-truce will be over. Predators and herbivores who now share branches in peace will be back down on the ground, trying to kill and avoid being killed.

  Raptor Red looks around at the many pairs of eyes staring out from the conifer crown. One pair of eyes is staring right back. It bobs up and down. Raptor Red can see a long snout in front of the eyes, and on the snout is a bright crimson streak.

  It's the male who tried to court her near Tick-Bird Meadow. Now he goes into a modified courtship dance, hanging on to the tree with his hindfeet, moving his shoulders and neck gracefully.

  WHACKITY-WHACKS

  JUNE

  Whack-whack-clank-crack.

  Ouch! the big Acrocanthosaurus thinks as his tooth crown breaks off, leaving the nerve exposed. He drops the little armored dinosaur he was trying to swallow.

  Whackity-whackity - WHACK.

  Ouch. He reacts again to a sharp pain on his shin where the armored dino's spikes hit.

  WHACK-WHACK-WHACK. The little dino is like a big ultraprickly pinecone, made of bone and muscle, powered by a spastic motor. The acro backs up again, his ankle smarting from a dozen hits from the armored protuberances.

  Whump-whack-whump. The baby Gastonia twitches nose to tail again, sending clods of mud over the acro.

  No good - not worth the trouble, the acro thinks to himself. He doesn't like food morsels that make him bleed inside and out. He's swallowed crocodiles whole before. Their bony ridges were a bit painful as they slid down his gullet. But this little armor-clad demon is much worse.

  His broken tooth throbs - it was a fully developed tooth, not ready to be shed. There's no discomfort when a tooth cr
own drops out on schedule. The root gets resorbed, the nerve and blood vessel dry up, and the new tooth growing in under the old crown simply pushes the remnant out of the jaw.

  But the gaston has whacked the acre's teeth hard from inside the acro's mouth as the big predator was about to gulp it down. Several healthy crowns, still connected to nerves, are now cracked.

  The acro backs up again. Then he runs forward and tries to kick the gaston. The little dino hunkers down so close to the ground that the acro misses. The acro steps hard on the gaston's body, flattening it into the mud.

  Blurp. The gaston blows watery mud out of his nostrils.

  The acro comes to a conclusion: Pinecone dinosaurs - not food.

  The acro certainly doesn't need this nasty tidbit. A hundred tons of carrion piled up along the river sandbars after the flood - thousands of dinosaur bodies, limp and battered, caught in groves of trees and thickets of cycads. It's a scavenger's smorgasbord.

  After the frustrated meat-eater wanders away, the baby gaston stands up and sniffs the breeze. The gaston's not real bright compared to a raptor. Like most dino-herbivores, the gaston has only a medium-size brain, about the size of a crocodile of the same body bulk. That's far less mental mass than a Deinonychus or a Utahraptor has.

  And being an herbivore doesn't supply the mental challenges that an active predator gets every day. A gaston doesn't have to hunt very far for food - it uses its broad, low muzzle to crop off wide mouth-fuls of conifer seedlings and cycads, food that doesn't fight back or run away.

  The baby gaston knows only a few things, but he knows them very well: Eating the right plants. Avoiding poisonous plants. (He was born with a poison-alarm system, programmed into his olfactory sense.) Avoiding falling off cliffs. (Most land vertebrate species are born with a fear of steep slopes.)

  And go whackity-whack when he's bothered by something.

  Since every vulnerable corner of his body is protected by strong bony plates of armor with sharp ridges or spikes sticking out, whackity-whack is a pretty useful response to most threatening situations. The gaston has a short but strong neck, with wide muscles for swinging the armored head side to side. The long torso is so broad and low that predators have a hard time flipping the gaston over on its back. And the long tail has the strongest sideways-flexing muscles, compared to body weight, of any dinosaur.

  Whackity-whack has been the simple and successful defensive game plan of the Gastonia species and their ancestors for thirty million years, since the first member of the Ankylosaurian order evolved, far back in the Jurassic Period.

  The baby gaston hasn't a clue how he ended up in the tree. He remembers that he was huddled with his family, facing downwind to keep the rain out of their eyes, on a tall levee - a raised mound of mud that bordered a river. All of a sudden the levee broke. A brutally strong wall of water smashed through the breach, hurling jagged chunks of soil and muck across the floodplain, bowling over the adult gastons and washing away the little ones.

  The baby gaston shut his eyes and went whackity-whack at the floodwater. He kept his armored eyelids shut for nearly two days afterward. He remembers being bumped in three dimensions, going up, going down, and then far up; then movement stopped. The sun came out, and he was just beginning to dry out when someone kicked him, and he fell into the water again.

  He found himself beached on a low spit of sand. Had he kept his eyes open, he would have seen that he had, in fact, performed a spectacular trick worthy of the finest circus.

  He had gotten caught in the branches of a ripped-up cycad tree. Cycad trunks are low-density compared to most other trees, and the cycad with the gaston aboard had bobbed like a balsa raft. It washed downstream for two miles, then jammed itself against a grove of old conifers. A particularly fast burst of floodwater pushed the cycad around and around and finally slid the lightweight cycad wood up the sloping trunks of three partially fallen conifers. The gaston had fallen off the cycad and landed on the lower branches of an old conifer.

  Thanks to Raptor Red's curiosity, the gaston had been pushed out of the tree. But the currents were abating, and he was carried only a short distance before being left aground.

  Now that he's sure the acrocanthosaur is gone, the baby gaston starts pumping his chubby legs as fast as he can - toward the source of a scent that shows where his family is.

  Gastons have fared well in the flood. Their wide bodies float right side up even in rough water, unlike the poor iguanodons, who often get tumbled sideways. And the armor plate protected the delicate gastonian viscera from all the collisions with rocks and fallen logs.

  The baby gaston sees a high-stepping predator of about three hundred pounds coming right at him. He hunkers down again, waiting. A young male red-snouted Utahraptor is approaching, curious. This carnivore is far more careful than the acro had been. The raptor tentatively reaches out with one forepaw, stretching one finger.

  One little tap and - whack-whack.

  No - no good to eat, the raptor thinks, but - good to play with.

  The male raptor tiptoes around to the other side and reaches out. Tap-tap - whackity-whack!

  The male raptor has had a fine day so far - there's free meat everywhere. No worries about food for the next week or so. He's the most inquisitive of all the brothers and sisters who hatched out five years ago. He gets away with it because he's also the quickest. He can jump sideways or backward or straight up and land facing the opposite direction.

  He likes to poke strange animals - to see what will happen. Now he creeps around the baby gaston till he's dead astern. The raptor swings his own tail in anticipation. He notices his own tail movement. An idea!

  The raptor turns around and swings his tail at the gaston. Just missed!

  He creeps backward a half-step, and swings his tail again. The raptor tail tip barely brushes the end of the gaston's tail.

  Whackity-WHACK. Sand flies sideways as the gas-ton performs a particularly vigorous full-body swoosh.

  The male raptor moves to the front, behind a tussock of fern fronds. He crouches. Then he charges, stopping abruptly a yard from the gaston's head.

  No whackity-whack this time.

  The raptor sighs. He crouches, then leaps over the gaston.

  Still no whackity-whack. The male raptor is getting bored with his toy.

  He backs off, takes a running start, and jumps over the gaston while dragging one toe just low enough to touch its back.

  Whackity-whack.

  A deep coughing roar announces the arrival of seven adult gastons. The baby coughs a reply. The male raptor studies the gastons as they advance. Short legs - very slow is his analysis. He's learned that the higher the body and the longer the shins and ankles, the faster the dinosaur. He can outrun nearly all his dinosaurian neighbors except for the ostrich dinos, small-headed omnivores with exceedingly elongated lower legs.

  He knows he can run rings around the gastons. He trots up to meet them. They stop, lower their heads in a threat, and swing their tails.

  Too big whackity-whacks here - dangerous. The raptor's brain evaluates the one-ton size of the adult gastons. If those adult bodies whack him, it won't be fun anymore. So if he can't eat them and can't play with them, he'll just go away.

  The raptor terminates the game of Taunt the Gaston. He moves up the sand dune and turns west into a wide valley. Here are posted thousands of messages from other dinosaurs. Challenges from young male Utahraptor. Sexual invitations from deinonych widowers who lost their mates in the flood. Panic signals from Astrodon young, separated from their parents and uncles and aunts. Pompous declarations from acros who boast of their indisputable position as Kings of the Cretaceous.

  There are even the small-voiced messages from multis, plant-eating furballs who live in colonies: I've just dug a new burrow here, and all the shrubs within a ten-yard radius are mine.

  The young male Utahraptor's mind is swamped with all the messages criss-crossing in claim and counterclaim. It's a cacophony of aromas, like
a dozen rap songs sung at once in the language of scent. He tries to read every one. It's a Cretaceous highway of information, all written in shit.

  Dung is the queen of media in the Cretaceous. With his voluminous olfactory chambers, the male Utahraptor can distinguish ten thousand different individuals of his own species from their dung-aroma. He can tell whether a young female is alone and available or firmly bonded in monogamous union. He can tell how long the message has been exposed to the sun and rain.

  Appearances may be deceiving, and like all raptors the male insists on a dung-document to prove the identity and status of strangers. It will always be this way with long-snouted predators. His distant cousins, the great tyrannosaurs of the later Cretaceous, will have huge snout chambers for their sense of smell. So will the bears and wolves and hyenas much farther in the geological future. Of all the land animals who hunt big game, only one will come along who cannot read the dung-sign -Homo sapiens.