RAPTOR RED

BUBBLES AUGUST

The white dactyl decides he’ll make some bubbles.

He’s watched the raptor pack for half a day. He’s eaten as much as he can without hindering his ability to take off from the ground. Now he’s bored again.

The breeze is blowing hard over the sand flat. The white dactyl hops off the tree and feels the hot sand under his hands and feet. He walks batwise, with knees turned outward and his elbows strongly bent. He looks awkward and uncomfortable, but the ultra-strong chest muscles that power his flight give his arms the strength to hop quickly over the ground.

The white dactyl is a very cautious walker. He will go for a stroll only when there’s a strong, constant breeze, enough wind energy to lift his body if he unfurls his wings. He never walks far in still air. That would be suicidal - too many land predators would be tempted to run him down.

His three walking foreclaws dig into the sand at each step, cutting deep incisions each time. Right next to each clawprint comes the narrow hindpaw, with its four small, straight claws.

The trackway he leaves behind on the sand flat looks wide and inelegant compared with Raptor Red’s footprints. The white dactyl is a distant cousin of the raptor’s - both could trace their ancestry to fast-stepping land predators. But dactyl limbs have become ill-suited to land locomotion. The three sharp, narrow, hooklike foreclaws on each hand are perfect for hanging on to trees and cliffs but inefficient for walking. The dactyl chest muscles are gigantic flight engines that power the wings but cannot give a fast terrestrial gait.

The dactyl’s strongest extremity is his fourth finger, increased in length and bulk a thousandfold over the usual dinosaurian condition. This is the flight finger, thicker and stronger than the dactyl’s thigh, the flexible strut that holds up the entire wing leading edge.

The white dactyl does have a sense of how different he is from all his distant dinosaurian kin. He puts all life into two categories: can-fly; can’t-fly. He knows that if it’s clever, any can-fly can avoid injury and death from can’t-flys.

FWP! He jumps across a narrow stream bed onto a tall river-channel sandbar. He swivels his thin, flexible neck around to check out the raptor pack. Three chicks are asleep in the warm afternoon sun. Three adults are nearly motionless too. No sign of nervousness.

The low-angle sun highlights the long line of dactyl footprints leading from the kill site to the river. The white dactyl cocks his head and stares. He’s used to seeing dinosaur footprints from the air, laid out map-fashion. He can identify a dozen dino-species from two hundred feet up from their characteristic stride pattern and foot geometry. But he hasn’t seen his own tracks so clearly marked before. He knows how to identify dactyl tracks from the air - by their widely spaced imprints and the unusual three-fingered hands - and he enjoys a moment of self-realization as he surveys the record of his own footsteps.

It’s interesting, and the sight relieves his boredom for a moment.

He finds a spot where the wind is screened by a high sand-dune crest. He peers into a pool of murky water. There’s a brownish object wriggling in slow motion in the bottom muck.

His beak stabs down, and he swallows a juvenile lungfish, a foot and a half long.

But he’s not really here to fish.

Zip-bib-bib-bib.

Big brown bubbles rise lazily to the surface as he exhales with his entire face under water.

Pip-pip-pip-

The bubbles pop as he neatly pricks each one in turn with his beak tip.

He invented this game a month ago, when he accidently coughed underwater while trying to catch a turtle. He was intrigued by the big bubbles that hung around the water surface. And since his basic approach to Nature is When in doubt, poke it! he had the exhilarating experience of exploding bubbles bursting around his snout.

Bib - bib - grrg. An especially corpulent bubble, the largest he has blown, rises and sits like a crystalline dome, motionless on the surface.

He looks with admiration at his handiwork. A water-strider bug zigzags crazily around the bubble, bumping into it repeatedly. A dry fern fragment drifts in on the wind and falls down onto the bubble’s roof, sticking there. Now a flotilla of smaller bubbles join their flagship, some adhering to the big bubble, some merging with it.

The white dactyl is startled to see the sky reflected in a spherical distortion, the bubble acting like a fish-eye lens. He cocks his head and stares very closely.

He sees clouds in the bubble, and a dactyl flock very far away - and a raptor face very close.

His whole body galvanizes into an emergency take-off. His left wingtip hits water. His feet spread sand everywhere. With panicked clumsiness he ascends the sandbar and catches the breeze. He’s aloft and downwind in a few seconds.

Raptor Red doesn’t even look at the dactyl disappearing along the riverbank. She’s absorbed with the thousands of bubbles, large and small, left by his sudden take-off.

Exploration is mental play, and big-brained carnivores are the most playful in any ecosystem. Raptor Red was enjoying the sense of well-fed well-being on the sand flat when she saw the dactyl doing something strange out on the river. She has no fear of this dactyl - and no desire to eat it either. So curiosity took over.

She’s been watching the bubble game for several minutes. She shares with the dactyl a predator’s love of slap-and-grab games. Anything that small and that moves suddenly is a target for grabbing. When she was a chick, she learned snout-eye coordination by slapping at leaves that danced across the ground in the wind. As a young adult she sharpened her reflexes by trying two-handed grabs at the multis, the plump furballs who live in colonial burrows like Cretaceous prairie dogs.

She’s never tried to slap a bubble.

She sticks her muzzle into the water and pulls it out. Too slow. The bubbles are tiny and unsatisfying.

SPLSH! She whacks her muzzle into the pool. Too fast. Ripples everywhere, and foam, but no big fat bubbles.

She sputters and coughs. She can’t figure it out. She’s bothered - most of her life she’s been able to learn new predator tricks by mimicry. She’s watched her parents, her sisters, even raptors of other species.

This time she gives up. The capacity to learn is a combination of inborn intelligence and long experience. The white dactyl is too clever and too long-lived and too wise. Raptor Red will never know all that he knows. She looks up, scanning the sky. The white dactyl is already far away.

And he is in a foul mood. He dislikes being forced to take off suddenly. He dislikes having a dinosaur creep up close behind him - even a dinosaur he considers friendly. He dislikes not being in complete control.

He ascends to a thousand feet, making grumbly noises to himself. He checks out the Utahraptor sisters and their chicks. He sees a Deinonychus pack, a big one. Twenty of the medium-size raptors are camped downwind ten miles from Raptor Red.

The white dactyl knows what will make his bad mood disappear. He rises slowly upwind and makes a wide turn to get the sun directly behind him. Then he closes his wings and dives.

He builds up speed fast. He adjusts his dive angle with slight movements of the membrane between thigh and tail. At 200 feet he opens his wings and flattens the dive.

He comes over the treeline at 150 miles per hour in nearly level flight. The deinonychs have no warning. The alpha male is standing up, scratching himself behind the ear, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his back.

FWOOOOOOOOP!

The deinonych ducks at the last millisecond and loses his balance, falling into a group of subadult males, who scatter. The white dactyl scores with his beak tip, leaving a small but painful wound on the alpha male’s hip.

As he ascends again in the afternoon air, the white dactyl can see the entire Deinonychus pack milling around in great agitation.

The old pterodactyl feels much better now.