RAPTOR RED

ALWAYS GO FOR THE ONE THAT LIMPS SEPTEMBER

Too fast, too fast, too fast… Raptor Red is hidden in a brown tangle of ferns, dead still. Only her bright eye betrays her presence, watching a flock of ostrich dinos run by.

Much too fast. She blinks, a long deliberate blink she uses to clean dust off her eyeball, the sort of blink an eagle will use while it waits for the ideal moment to dive down on an antelope calf. Her nictitating membrane, a clear, moist sheet of tissue that travels sideways across her eye, passes over her eyeball like a high-tech wind-shield washer.

Raptor Red knows she must operate at peak performance in all senses, all locomotor organs, all powers of reason. She and her sister and the young male face a tough challenge today: feeding themselves and satisfying the voracious appetites of three fast-growing chicks, all on a diet of ostrich dinosaurs, the smartest, fastest, most difficult prey a raptor dares to attack.

But Raptor Red has great confidence in the efficiency of her newly enlarged pack. The addition of the young male has doubled the kill ratio. The oldest chick helps too when she can. When operating as a foursome, the Utahraptor pack succeeds in half of their attacks.

Too fast - too fast. Raptor Red watches the ostrich dinos prance by. She can see the young male raptor at work. He is spooking the flock, moving around the far side, exposing his head and shoulders for a few seconds so the ostrich dinos will get agitated and move over toward the spot where Raptor Red and her sister are hiding.

Much too fast. A big ostrich dino hen, three hundred pounds at least, shifts into passing gear. Her body floats in the air. Her unbelievably long shins and ankles strike down and backward in short strokes, throwing up a yellow puff of dust each time the compact toenails dig into the dried turf.

She’s going more than fifty miles per hour -effortlessly. No dinosaur in the Early Cretaceous is faster. Her intelligent eyes do quick surveys right and left and behind her, her graceful swanlike neck turning constantly. This hen too is confident - confident in her powers of escape, in her supreme velocity that guarantees no dinosaur can catch her once she has reached her full speed.

The hen’s sense of invulnerability comes not just from the feeling of raw power in her leg muscles. She’s clever and a quick learner. She’s seven years old, a mother twice, a survivor of twenty-five previous ambushes by raptors and six by the hulking acrocanthosaurs.

The hen is almost smug. She knows that there are raptors to the left and raptors to the right, and she knows that she has enough of a head start. The only thing that could bring her down right now would be if she put her foot into a burrow made by the furballs, who live in immense underground colonies. At this speed jamming a foot in a burrow would break her ankle, and she’d be dead in a few seconds.

The hen doesn’t worry about the burrows. They’re there. But at such a high speed she can’t see them. She doesn’t worry about things beyond her control.

The hen’s left foot just barely touches the outer rim of a multi burrow. Inside, the family of furry mammals huddle together, wincing at the thunder of feet above. The hen stumbles once.

Raptor Red sees the misstep. She cocks her head in that direction. But the ostrich dino hen recovers without losing much speed. In three more strides she’s back at maximum velocity.

Raptor Red moves her head quickly, in jerks, trying to take in all the action. The ostrich dino flock is breaking up, fragmenting into six or seven units. A light-brown blur passes - three ostrich dino chicks, half grown, almost as fast as their mother.

Even the chicks - too fast. Raptor Red’s automatic prey evaluation computer cranks out the discouraging results.

THERE! Raptor Red’s eyes lock onto a male ostrich dino, far behind the mother-chick subgroup. Her visual mode changes immediately from wide-scan search to monofocus. Her keen sight has picked out that male - he’s limping.

Her sister has locked on the same male. Their predator visual system is superb at picking up the slightest irregularity in the rhythm of running. The slight asymmetry of right-left leg strokes. The almost imperceptible clumsiness on one foot that shows a joint injured or diseased.

Raptor Red starts running, hunched down. She can see her sister running low down ahead. The entire ostrich dino flock veers away and picks up speed. All the ostrich dinos are pulling away from the raptor sisters.

All except one.

The raptor male leaps over the bushes, lands in a full crouch, and takes off. For a few seconds he gains on a group of hens in the middle of the flock. His short, bulgy calf muscles give him quicker acceleration than the ostrich dinos. He gets within ten feet of a young hen. But she’s reaching her maximum speed now and pulls away from him.

The whole flock turns away and crosses obliquely in front of the raptor sisters.

Raptor Red’s ears are full of a hundred thud-thuds a second, the rapid-fire beating of ostrich dino hind-paws on the earth. The dust cloud now grows to fifty feet high. Raptor Red can’t see them clearly anymore, even though they are very close. Individual ostrich dinos appear as dark or light phantasms - sometimes one catches the light filtering through the dust, sometimes another is in deep shadow.

Whooooph. A big hen cuts right in front of Raptor Red’s nose. She pays no attention.

Whoooph-whoooph. Two ostrich dino chicks zip by, right astern. Raptor Red feels their wake in the air behind her. But she keeps running ahead.

A big shadowy mass just misses her and flies a foot over her shoulders. It’s an ostrich dino cock, leaping in terror.

For a second Raptor Red sees her sister and the older raptor chick in the dust, coming the opposite way. Raptor Red stands upright, still running. A long-neck with a nearly toothless head emerges from the dust, then disappears. Raptor Red can see a pair of slender arms with three straight claws, poking wildly.

She ducks down and just avoids being stung by the ostrich dino hands. Raptor Red catches a glimpse of the huge eyes of the ostrich dino, turning in every direction, looking for escape. The head vanishes again into the dust.

KLUMP! Something falls, hard, a few feet away.

Raptor Red slows, stops.

There is her sister, sitting on top of the male ostrich dino who was limping. He’s already dead, his chest cut open by slashes of her left hindclaw.

The male raptor comes up, panting. He’s run harder and longer than the rest of the pack. And it’s very hot now. The dust has plugged up one nostril, and he sits down to clean the dirt out with his hindfoot.

Raptor Red’s sister glares at him. He tries to pretend he doesn’t see. She begins to huff and puff and pull the carcass away, toward the treeline where the two smaller chicks are waiting. They were with their mother at the beginning of the hunt an hour ago, but the heat got to be too much for them. Their mother and aunt let them get away with this lazy behavior for now.

As the two little chicks play with the long ankle bones of the ostrich dino - all that remains of the beast after an hour of chewing and scratching - the young male inches closer and closer to one of the youngsters. Raptor Red is watching.

The young male is only a foot away from the chick’s tail tip. Raptor Red stares at the young male’s lips. She won’t be alarmed until she sees the upper lip curled back, uncovering the glistening ivory of the teeth.

SQWAKKKKKKKKKK! Raptor Red’s sister comes flying through the group. Chicks scatter to both sides, like a six-seven-ten split being converted by a pro bowler. The young male rolls completely over into the defensive-submissive posture: both pairs of clawed feet, two aft, two forward, protecting his vulnerable belly, his back slightly arched against the ground.

SsssssssHSSSSS. Raptor Red’s sister gets between the chicks and the male. She paws the air with strokes of her left hind killing claw. She’s serious -and he knows it. She’s ninety-nine percent of the way to a kill-or-be-killed confrontation.

Raptor Red pretends that she is calm, unaware of the bloody-minded emotions being displayed. She saunters over to her sister, her back to the male, and makes grooming noises with her jaws a few inches from her sister’s head.

For a full five seconds, the male and Raptor Red’s sister just stare unblinking at each other. Raptor Red nuzzles her sister’s neck. Her sister recoils and bares her teeth. Raptor Red nuzzles her neck again.

Her sister turns her head and looks at Raptor Red, pupils full of hate. But the pupils contract, and her sister turns away.

The male rolls over and slinks across the ground in the other direction.

Raptor Red is only acting calm. Inside she’s agitated, torn up. She wants to be a fully mated couple with her chosen male. She has a tremendous hormonal surge. But her bond with her sister goes far back. And when the male bares his teeth at the chicks, Raptor Red feels like attacking him. Forces are at war inside her head, and she can’t figure them out.

She looks at the male, then at her sister and the chicks. She realizes that she doesn’t want to leave her sister or her chicks - that bond is strong. It’s the heavy hand of kin selection, the investment a sister is willing to make in her sibling’s health and happiness and in the health of her chicks. It’s a form of genetic selfishness. By helping your sister and her children, you’re helping your own genes survive.

Of course, genes can’t plan a strategy. Genes can’t think, can’t feel, can’t mourn the loss of a loved one. Genes can’t bite, can’t bleed, can’t feel pain. Genes are tiny pixels of inheritance, devoid of feeling. They’re short segments of chemicals, each carrying commands for building small parts of a body or small portions of programmed behavior.

Raptor Red does think and feel and weigh the conflicting demands of her young consort and her sister. She does indeed carry genes that have survived ten million raptor generations by inducing Utahraptor females to favor their relatives. But she’s no gene-dictated automaton. The genetic bond of sisterhood works through complex emotions and a conscious sense of the right thing to do.

Raptor Red has a deep pervasive belief that what matters is getting her young relatives into the next generation of breeders. That’s more important than her own individual happiness or the happiness of her mate. Genes have given her this morality, genes that gave her ancestors a bit of an edge in reproduction generation after generation. And at this moment these very same genes are producing a terrible emotional conflict.

Raptor Red is close to loving her male consort. But she knows the young male might kill her sister’s chicks. And if he tries to, Raptor Red will kill him.

The crime of infanticide is built into the Utahraptor family system, as it is throughout nature. Male genes demand it. What’s a male to do if his consort already has young from a previous mating? Those chicks don’t carry his genes. The cruel arithmetic is this: The male will help his own genes most by killing the young that aren’t his, so he and his mate can get started raising a new brood.

Long before the time of Utahraptor, infanticide was commonplace among dinosaurs and tiny mammals and frogs. And long after Utahraptor it will guide the actions of male lions, male alligators, and male apes.

Raptor Red belongs to a species that is making a momentous transition in family life from a male-dominated pack structure to an incipient matriarchy. The adult females have become larger and stronger than the males. They can accept or reject suitors. They tend to mate for life. The ancestral raptors had a different social system. The males were larger. They fought each other to control all the breeding females in a pack. And they’d drive away or kill the chicks from different fathers, unless the mother left the pack with her chicks and struck out on her own.

That’s how Raptor Red’s species got its start. A group of sisters left a big pack and descended into a dry valley where their evolutionary path diverged. The mothers obtained greater power, and they’re no longer at the mercy of the alpha males.

Raptor Red and her sister still carry genes of distrust, genes that were fixed ages before, when strange males were always dangerous to chicks. And these distrustful genes are still valuable, because males can still lapse into the vicious old ways. Raptor Red has seen it. She has seen Utahraptor chicks pulled to pieces when a strange male bonds with a mother whose mate has died.

And Raptor Red sees the slight upcurl of the lip in her young male when the chicks bump against him. She sees him stalk the chicks when he thinks Raptor Red and her sister aren’t looking.

Yes, her chosen mate, this young male who can be so courtly and attractive and graceful, still carries the genes to be a child murderer.

The young male doesn’t know why he has such violent impulses toward the chicks. But he does know it upsets Raptor Red, and he doesn’t want to do that. His intelligence and his devotion to Raptor Red can override ancient impulses.

The adult raptors remain in a state of extreme tension for the rest of the day. Every time the male gets up and walks around, Raptor Red’s sister and her oldest chick stand with mouths open, menacing him. The younger chicks cower behind their mother, while the young male backs up and averts his eyes. Finally, as night falls and the pack must make a temporary nest, Raptor Red tries to bump snouts with her sister, who growls.

Raptor Red grunts to the chicks and walks over to her consort. She gives him a play bite on the neck, as she has done many times.

He thinks it’s a very hard play bite.

Ridge-backs are everywhere - dangerous. Raptor Red’s mind is in high alarm mode. She’s on guard duty in the morning, sitting on the edge of a one hundred-foot cliff, looking down onto the plains, where three big gaggles of acrocanthosaurs are milling around, crunching the chewed-up carcasses left by the raptor pack.

The acro populations have boomed because of immigration from drought-stricken areas to the east. Raptors don’t like to tangle with acros in large groups. So the Utahraptor packs have been shifting their hunting territory nearly every day to the north and west as the acro invasion gets worse and worse.

An acro is wandering up an arroyo where the spring rains have cut a deep gash in the red earth. It’s a male, mature this season. He’s been driven out of his family group - a fate that happens to all male acros at this time of their life. Now he has to find a piece of biological real estate to claim as his own.

It’s an anxious time for any dinosaur. This one isn’t full of bravado. He doesn’t know yet that his species is the biggest and strongest predator in all of North America. All he knows is that a week ago he was safe and comfy in his family, sharing kills. Today he’s on his own, and he feels awfully unprepared.

He’s used to making short expeditions on his own, to investigate exotic scent trails. But up till now, whenever something frightened him, he could retreat back to mother.

He stops to lick the inside of his gums with his narrow triangular tongue. He can’t put much pressure on his mouth lining because the tongue is very muscular and can’t move much side to side. There’s still a sore place where a prickly animal had gone whackity-'whack inside his mouth earlier in the season.

He doesn’t like having to get all his food by himself. But when he tried to go back to his mother’s group, she shooed him away.

Sniff… snff… snff… SNFFFFFF! Easy food - maybe - raptor smell! His mood improves. His family group has made a living by stealing kills from raptors. Acros don’t feel like felons - they consider it as noble to steal a carcass as to make the kill themselves. More noble, because usually they waste less energy stealing.

The young acro has learned to associate the raptor-pack smell with easy-to-steal prey. Usually raptors don’t fight back - unless the acros threaten the raptor chicks. Then all hell can break loose.

SNNNFFFFF. The acro presses his snout against the base of an old gnarled tree with a split crown. This is peculiar. The raptor scent seems to go up the tree. The acro hasn’t run into this situation before.

The acro stares straight at the tree. He’s not programmed to look up, because prey usually isn’t found high above the head of an acrocanthosaur. He’s programmed to look down and look around.

Some dried leaves and a branch fall on the acre’s forehead. He shuts his wide upper eyelids. The top of his head is covered with thick, horny skin, reinforced below by layers of dense bone. Things falling on his head rarely do damage.

Whunk! A big dead branch hits him right between the eyes. He flinches.

This is a new sensation - being bombed by heavy objects from above. He doesn’t like it.

The raptor scent becomes overpowering, and it’s coming from right overhead. The acro does something he’s never tried before. He rolls his head to the right and looks up with his left eye.

The raptor! his mind screams. The raptor is in the tree.

The acro backs up and measures the distance. He reaches as far as his neck and head will go.

Nope - too high, he thinks.

He snuffles around the tree and bumps it accidentally with the low horns that stick up in front of his eyebrows.

The dead, rotted wood shudders.

Wow -1 didn’t know I could do that… make a tree wobble. The acro is discovering his own physical strength.

He bumps the tree harder, and it wobbles harder. The raptor chick twenty-five feet up hisses and screams.

Cool -1 can rattle the raptor would be a loose translation of the acro’s thoughts.

The acro butts the tree hard. The raptor chick makes a panic noise.

The acro circles around, rolls his head, stops, lowers his snout, flexes his knees and ankles, and runs straight at the tree.

The tree trunk cracks away from its roots. The wood splinters straight down from the crown. Thick sections tumble on top of the acro’s head and shoulders. He closes his eyes tight, hears scrabbling noises and a thunk.

The acro opens his eyes. Lying upside down on the ground, looking right back at him five feet away, is a half-grown raptor chick, bruised, dazed, and scared.