Raptor Red Read online

  After reading his way through a half-mile of the shit bulletin board, the male raptor comes to a small, brand-new pile of dung, one clearly deposited after the flood, on a high crest of sand. He sniffs. He stares. He paws at the ground to refresh the scent.

  It's raptor shit. He sniffs again - it's Utahraptor shit, not the Yellow Snout species but his own red-snouted kind, one who has been eating fresh astro meat with a little iguanodon liver.

  Very interesting. He sniffs very slowly, very loudly. There are some undifferentiated signals -raptors whose fecal signature doesn't say whether they are male or female. And the strongest signal comes from adult females - and he recognizes one particular individual.

  Very, very interesting.

  It's very confusing to a young male, but very exciting too. He turns around, three complete circles, sniffing, and delicately overlays the pile with a message of his own.

  I was here after you - I - a young, healthy, unattached male.

  The male begins to follow the trail of that one particular female.

  He searches with his nose, trying to untangle a dozen overlapping raptor scent-trails. He's after just one particular family group. He finds them a day later.

  Raptor Red and her sister are feeling fine. The sun and the limitless banquet of flood-killed corpses everywhere are a predator's dream come true. The night of terror in the water and up the tree has been pushed back to the far reaches of memory. For Raptor Red the experience will come in handy several times later in her life, but right now the joy of the present occupies all her consciousness.

  The only irritation today is the huge flocks of carrion-loving dactyls and birds. Not just-the big aggressive Ornithocheirus but more timid Ornithodesmus too, very agile fliers with short, sharp-edged teeth arranged in a broad semicircle around the front of the beak.

  The raptor pack are lying next to a chewed-up Astrodon calf. Raptor Red gets up to shoo away a pair of cheeky Ornithodesmus. They whistle and squawk and jump around. Raptor Red hisses and makes fake attacks. It's hard to be convincing when her belly is so full and she's feeling so warm and comfy.

  The Ornithodesmus reek of rancid seafood. They've been feeding on grounded 'panzer-fish,' trout-size species covered with thick, shiny scales. The sight of so many dinosaur hulks tempted the dactyls to try to steal some meat. These dactyls are smart and flexible - they'll try a new food source just to see what it's like.

  Why bother - I'm stuffed - don't care, Raptor Red thinks to herself. Every time she chases the dactyls away from the neck of the astro, they flutter over to the tail. If she were lean, with an empty stomach, she'd be mean and nasty and would try to bite their pretty white heads off.

  But Ornithodesmus is too unaggressive to be a danger to the chicks. With a mental shrug that could be translated What the hell, Raptor Red gives up and walks away. The delighted dactyls bounce on top of the astro and yank away at strings of meat hanging from the edges of broken bones. They have little success - they're not strong enough to rip the tendons and ligaments holding the meat to bone - but they seem to enjoy the novel exercise.

  RELUCTANT SISTER-IN-LAW

  JUNE

  He came with a dried-up turtle in his mouth. He walks with exaggerated steps, bringing his knees high, silently, like a dinosaurian mime.

  Raptor Red has been watching him for several minutes now. The young male has already completed the first act of the dance. Now he's beginning the much more difficult second act. She hasn't awakened her sister, who is snoring loudly, lying on her side because her gut is too stuffed to lie on her stomach.

  The male raptor lowers his head almost to the ground and swings it left and right. This part of the courtship dance is the toughest. The slow-motion head and neck gestures are done with the hands pulled back against the chest. Balancing is difficult. Proper execution of the dance requires that the deadly hand claws be out of sight - there can be no suggestion of a threat.

  Raptor Red marvels at the smooth execution of the dance. Intuitively she knows that only a male in the peak of health can perform this way. She begins to flex and extend her own knees and ankles just a little bit, while she remains sitting, following with her eyes the step routine the male is performing.

  She hasn't the slightest interest in the dried turtle as a food item. It's a symbolic gift. Even if she were hungry, she wouldn't look at the turtle as lunch. Long, long ago, a thousand generations or more, raptor males gave fresh meat, recently killed, as a gift to reluctant females. It was a courtship bribe -and a promise of parental duties that would be fulfilled.

  Take this meat - see, I can help feed you and our unborn chicks was the message.

  Now Raptor Red is watching a gift-dance of stylized formality, the program rewritten and rewritten again by that most innovative of choreographers, natural selection.

  Raptor Red knows what she likes in a male dancer - slender, muscular limbs, and supple S-curves in neck movement - but she doesn't know why. She was born with a vague idea of male beauty, an idea that was refined by watching her mother and father. She doesn't know that these strict standards will help guarantee a mate who will be faster than she and more maneuverable - key assets when lovers hunt together as a team.

  Raptor Red doesn't know the history of her own species. Only one kind of animal will ever evolve the capacity to discover its own past - that will be Homo sapiens, a hundred and twenty million years hence.

  But Raptor Red does know that she wants a male at least as good as the one she lost. Better. Her standards are much higher than average for her species.

  Now she is very, very impressed.

  The male reaches far forward and, without the slightest muscular tremor, stretches his neck a few inches above the ground, extends his snout, opens his jaws, and drops the turtle a yard from Raptor Red's feet.

  He withdraws by walking slowly backward, facing Raptor Red as a medieval servant faces some all-powerful empress, his eyes focused on the ground.

  At the last moment he stumbles on a half-buried astro rib. But he recovers - it's an almost-invisible error in his program.

  Raptor Red cocks her head, as if she were disturbed. It's the response she's supposed to give, to make the male more nervous. But in reality she doesn't mind at all.

  Quite splendid - overall, she is thinking in unspoken judgment. If she had a concept of numbers, she'd give him a 9.6 out of 10.0 for the execution of the dance, and a 10.0 for the difficulty of the routine he chose.

  There is a long pause. The male looks up from the corner of his eye but doesn't move. Raptor Red feigns disinterest. She looks up at some big dactyls - they're Criorhynchus, big fellows with vertical crests on their snout tips. She yawns. She hisses at the dactyls.

  Now she looks at the turtle. It's been dead for a month, at least. There's hardly any digestible meat left.

  The male shifts his weight on his legs. His calf muscles are cramping.

  Raptor Red picks up the turtle and flips it in the air high above her muzzle. To the male, the turtle seems suspended, turning in slow motion in the air. He's just about decided that Raptor Red will let it drop.

  Gulp! The turtle disappears down her gullet. The brief taste she got was quite terrible, and she'll throw the turtle back up in five minutes.

  That won't matter. The male stands up, tall, and lets his hands fall straight down. He walks over to Raptor Red and sits down next to her and begins to groom her neck lightly.

  Hisssss ... HSSSsss. Raptor Red's sister wakes up and stares angrily at the male. She tries to get up, baring her teeth. The chicks get alarmed and retreat to the top of a tussock. But Raptor Red's sister's belly is just too full. She doesn't have the energy to generate a full-scale threat. And Raptor Red doesn't even turn around to acknowledge her sister's displeasure.

  Laboriously, Raptor Red's sister drags her bloated body over to where the chicks are and lies down in front of them.

  She sighs - as if to say, All right, if you insist, I won't bite him - but keep him away from me an
d my chicks.

  MANURE, LOVE, AND FLOWERS

  JUNE

  The male Utahraptor stands dead still in the shade of a cycad's palmlike leaves. Usually he has the fearlessness of a young adult. He's pumped full of hormones, and he has confidence in his muscles, his athleticism, his senses. He's not afraid to attack strange plant-eaters three times his size. He has little reluctance to challenge a mature male Utahraptor a hundred pounds greater in bulk.

  But now he's afraid of the color red. The young male is unnerved by the mass of red-purple objects hanging from bushes and low trees a few hundred yards away. Here is more red in one place than he's ever seen before. The six-foot-high wall of crimson stretches for a quarter-mile, and when the wind blows, the red objects undulate in a threatening manner.

  The young male's brain cannot cope. He can't deal with this scarlet overdose - there's no programmed instinct to make the proper choices when faced with so much color.

  Red is the most evocative hue in evolution among land animals. Red is the color that elicits the strongest emotions in birds, in lizards, in frogs - and in Utahraptor. Red triggers courtship and mate-bonding. But red is also the color of blood, the cue to fear death.

  The male raptor is used to handling red in small amounts. Red is the color he wears himself on the sides of his long muzzle. Red is the color he's programmed to seek in a mate. The first time he saw Raptor Red, he responded strongly because she wore an especially bright oval patch of red on her snout.

  Red is an eternal come-on. Long before the Cretaceous, red has transfixed the attention of animals with color vision. It shows up clearly against the green of foliage or the brown of soil. It's a universal language that will be understood by parrots and apes and human beings long after the Cretaceous.

  Reds and purples penetrate the environment and advertise their wearer as either a lover or a fighter; they are a loud message for females to come near and for other males to stay away.

  Evolution is a smart cosmetician. The male raptor has a two-stage recognition system: First, he's attracted to any raptor who wears the correct hue. Second, he scrutinizes the face for the correct pattern.

  He saw this mass of color five miles off, and his subconscious made him investigate. Up till this moment, the male raptor has grown excited every time he's seen a moving spot of red. But a hundred yards of scarlet and crimson is far too much stimulation. It overloads his circuits.

  And that's what he sees now in the woody shrubs growing in dense confusion at the base of the conifer wood: thousands of gaudy purplish-crimson blobs swaying in the wind. They are flowers. Primitive flowers with wide, simple petals arranged like a modern magnolia's. The male raptor has never seen flowers before, and it's a scary sight.

  Plus, there is all this buzzing. The closer he gets to the wall of red, the louder the sound becomes - a million insect wings humming.

  Utahraptor and all the other dinosaurs in its ecosystem have evolved in a world that's overwhelmingly green and brown. All the trees have been conifers or palm-leafed cycads or tree ferns -plants that are flowerless. All the undergrowth has been ferns, ground pine, horsetails, and conifer seedlings - strictly green and brown in every case. Raptors are used to seeing brown cones hanging from conifers, and the dark spots on fern fronds that contain the reproductive spores. Brown and green, green and brown - that's been the unbroken rule for every day the male raptor has lived. That's the world he's comfortable with.

  Big gaudy flowers are a New Thing, and predators are very suspicious of New Things.

  If the male raptor grew up in a dull green flower-less environment, the reason is simple: Flowering plants are evolutionary newcomers in his world. There were no flowers of any sort in the Jurassic Period, when the ancestors of raptors were being shaped by Darwinian forces. And when Utahraptor itself evolved, very early in the Cretaceous, the flora was still devoid of reproductive color.

  As the male raptor was growing up, the most important revolution in land plant life was occurring. Here and there, hidden in isolated patches of disturbed forest, where drought and floods and grazing dinosaurs put great pressure on the woody plants, a totally new life-form appeared. It was a small tree that did not trust the wind to spread its pollen. Instead, it evolved a colorized welcome mat to attract bugs to visit - a mat constructed of modified leaves that became petals.

  Purple and ultraviolet hues are visual bug-magnets. Once drawn to the petals, bugs are persuaded to linger, feeding on nutritious surplus pollen or at nectar pots built into the center of the flower. Then off the bugs will go to visit another floral attraction, each bug exporting pollen from the first flower.

  The flower is a stupendously clever adaptive device. Not only does it have more efficient fertilization inside the female plant organ, the flower guarantees that pollen will be carried from one plant to another with far less waste than is possible among nonflowering plants.

  Now, during the Early Cretaceous, Nature is adding other adaptive novelties - greater efficiency in growth of woody tissue - and so flowering plants are poised to make a momentous ecological leap. These plants will become the fastest-growing component of forests and woodlands in the middle and later days of the Cretaceous Period. By the time of Tyrannosaurus rex, forty million years after Utahraptor, every habitat will be brightened up by a profusion of flowers - red, orange, yellow, metallic blue.

  Dinosaur eyes and dinosaur brains will become used to seeing bright colors in the undergrowth. But right now, at this moment in Utahraptor history, the unexpected appearance of purple flowers causes even more consternation among dinosaur societies than a spaceship from another galaxy, full of little green men, would cause in downtown Los Angeles in the modern era.

  The young male becomes aware that he is not alone. The red flowers have acted like visual magnets, drawing in Utahraptor packs from all over. The big raptor species is usually rare. Its small clans are scattered widely, and except during the mating season, the families avoid each other. But the red-flowered shrubs are situated on a hill and can be seen by the keen-eyed predators thousands of yards away.

  The young male notices two bachelor Utahraptor carefully tiptoeing on the other side of the bushes. They advance with knees and ankles flexed, bodies held low to the ground, necks lowered.

  A gust of wind ripples the flowers unexpectedly, tossing a dozen petals into the air. The two bachelors turn and flee in full-speed retreat.

  Farther away the young male sees a large Utah-raptor pack - six females, one adult male, and chicks. They sway back and forth, rising as high as they can on their toes, staring and sniffing loudly.

  The young male jerks his snout up involuntarily. His nostrils flare as he draws in air in explosive bursts. It's the flowers. They smell. They smell very strong - they smell deliciousl

  They smell like overripe meat and liver mixed with fresh iguanodon dung.

  He marches with deliberate steps, pausing to cock his head and examine the bushes. Closer, closer. The red color swamps his visual centers. But the aroma of rotting viscera and ripe herbivore feces is compelling.

  He examines a patch of flower-heavy shrubs. There are three flower species growing together -one deep purple-red, one pale lavender, one white. All have petals arranged in a loose spiral around an odoriferous center. It's the white one that smells like rotting meat. The purple-red flowers smell more like liver and old skin. The lavender ones are dung-scented.

  Bfffffffft. A beetle blunders into his nostril, makes an annoying ruckus, and exits.

  Bfffffffft-bffffft. More beetles buzz around the shrubs, drawn in by the meaty aroma. The male raptor knows this type of bug. They're in the carrion beetle family, the sort of bugs who visit raptor kills to feed and deposit their eggs. Overripe stinky carcasses soon swarm with a wriggling mass of beetle larvae - voracious, hard-shelled maggots that gnaw off every residual scrap of flesh and leave the skeleton gleaming white.

  Other bugs are walking all over the pinkish flowers, big beetle species with metallic green
shells and wide antennae. The male raptor knows these too - he's found them many times on manure piles left by plant-eating dinos. There are small black wasps and blue beetles too.

  Now the male raptor is even more confused. Buzzing carrion-beetles should mean food - a carcass nearby. Dung beetles signal the presence of live herbivorous dinosaurs - prey waiting to be killed. But here among the flowers he can't find any real iguanodon flesh, either on a dead carcass or on a living animal. And no real dung.

  He nips at the white flowers. 'Bleachhhhh!' The flowers are bitter. He spits them out, disgusted.

  He's learned a new lesson and files it away in his memory bank: Meat-smelling plants = fraud. He won't be fooled again. But the bugs will be. The carrion beetles, wasps, and dung bugs have been drafted into the first wave of insect-flower co-evolution, species tricked by flower scents. In a few million years, carrion flies too will be fooled into helping pollination. Later still will come the pollinators par excellence - bees and moths and butterflies. But these later pollinators will be Darwinian sophisticates - they'll require continuous co-evolutionary bribery to meet the expanding needs of more and more flower species. The flowering plants will have to offer brighter petals, more complicated pollen chambers, and sweeter nectar in great quantity.