RAPTOR RED

TWO-TIERED DRAMA SEPTEMBER

At this moment, on that Early Cretaceous day, a double-level drama is being played out. On top of the stage made by the ground surface, raptors and acros play the leading roles of large and superlarge predators. Below the stage, underground, another storyline is being played out, by a supporting cast of tiny creatures who shun the daylight.

If you are the size of a mouse, a frog is a grotesque monster from a fairy tale. The Aegialodon is only a one-ounce insectivorous Cretaceous furball, a twitchy lump of hard muscle, long snout, beady black eyes, exquisitely sensitive whiskers, and spreading five-clawed feet fore and aft. A frog face has appeared in the aegi’s burrow. The frog’s mouth is almost wide enough to swallow the aegi.

A frog or a large beetle is a dangerous animal to the aegi. But a raptor is simply too big to be noticed. To the aegi, the acrocanthosaur and the raptors pounding the earth above his burrow are Forces of Nature, like earthquakes. He’s been feeling his burrow walls shake for a half hour. Then a bunch of leaves got jammed into his burrow opening. And inside the ball of leaves was a burrowing frog who had just been kicked by an acrocanthosaur foot, moving the amphibian sideways across the ground and into the aegi’s domain.

The frog, with his tiny frog brain, cannot grasp what’s happened. All he knows to do is seek cover from the mammoth animal mountains clomping around and threatening to squash his little froggy body flat.

The frog squeezes into the aegi’s hole headfirst. The aegi feels the unpleasant sensation of moist, bumpy frog skin pressed against his own face and ears. The aegi backs down his hole into the living chamber, a space two body-lengths wide, lined with soft, dry fur shed by the aegi. The frog is already there. It’s backed its squat body into a corner and tufts of aegi fur are sticking to the wet amphibian skin.

It’s totally dark inside. The aegi, with a good sense of smell and the finest high-frequency hearing of any Cretaceous critter, keeps track of what’s going on topside. It’s strangely quiet.

There are some situations your genes don’t prepare you for. The acrocanthosaur above finds himself in this predicament now. He stands amid the pieces of shattered tree trunk, not knowing whether to bite, charge, run away, or just keep standing there.

The fallen raptor chick makes a sound that mimics a big tire going flat slowly. The acro is tempted to reach down, bite, and shake. That’s what he always does to small prey items that make noise or wriggle. The chick is only 160 pounds - one-twentieth his own weight.

But raptors are dangerous. He noticed while growing up that his mother always got tense around them. And next to the chick is a hunk of ostrich dino carcass that the chick had dragged up the tree. It’s thirty pounds of fresh meat. Maybe he should just reach down, steal the meat, and run away. That would be safest.

To complicate matters further, a full-grown raptor is now screaming at him from several hundred yards upwind. One raptor isn’t enough to be a serious danger to an adult acro. A single raptor usually keeps its distance from a single acro, and vice versa. But this Utahraptor is coming at him, waving her arms, lashing her tail, and acting as if she were a veritable kamikaze dino, bent on crashing into him.

The chick’s body starts to come alive. Its hand claws are flexing and extending, and its hindfoot is vibrating.

Two raptors, too many - bite this one and run. The acro slowly makes up his mind. He can grab the little Utahmptor, shake the life out of it, and still have enough time to retreat out into the open ground, away from the adult raptor, where he can defend himself if necessary.

The acro uncoils his neck from the tight S-curve he normally carries it in. He opens his jaws, three feet from snout tip to ear. The chick starts to roll over, but its right side is still too stunned to stand up.

Below, the aegi furball hears a high-pitched sound, very loud, almost painful to his mammal ears. Then he hears a terrible collision noise, the ground rumbles and quakes, and his burrow collapses. Soil and roots momentarily pin the frog and the aegi down onto the floor of the living chamber.

The acro never saw the other adult raptor coming. Just before he can snap his jaws shut on the chick, the acro’s aim is spoiled by a mind-boggling noise from behind. He ducks instinctively.

The male raptor hits the back of the acro’s neck with his foreclaws. The clawtips rake diagonally down and backward, just missing the acro’s eyes.

The skin is tough here. The acro shakes his wide neck and torso violently, flinging the male raptor off onto the pile of broken wood. The acro leaps with both feet, missing the raptor but destroying the domicile of the aegi.

Get me OUT OF HERE! the acro’s brain yells at all his motor nerves. His reflex-loops start firing at random. He whips his tail around, not aiming at anything in particular, hitting the male raptor by pure luck.

The acro starts accelerating in the wrong direction. The adult female raptor is almost on top of him. He pivots awkwardly on one foot and does a U-turn, lowering his armored forehead.

The acro just grazes the male raptor again and knocks him down. He leaps over the fallen tree, once more shaking the underground shelter of the aegi.

Run, run, run, run, the acro thinks. His heart-lung machinery shifts smoothly into overdrive. Every breath he draws through his nostrils goes directly to huge air cells in his neck and torso and skull. Every contraction of his rib cage sends air already in the cells up and forward into the compact lungs housed in the ceiling of his body cavity.

The air is forced at high speed into thin tubules that pass tiny capillaries full of blood pumped from the heart’s pulmonary artery. Energy-giving oxygen is transferred from air tubes to bloodstream, at an efficiency twice what mammal lungs can do.

The acro covers a half-mile before he slows down. He’s glad to be alive.

Those raptors - VERY DANGEROUS, and smart. He’s convinced that he just barely escaped a deadly three-way ambush. He’ll never again get close to any raptor.

The raptor chick struggles to its feet. It was sure it was about to be eaten. Its mother rushes by to snarl at the retreating acro. She stops and returns to her chick, nudging it hard. The chick falls over, but it’s suffered no vital damage.

The male raptor, on the other hand, is hurting -three cracked ribs from the blow of the acro’s forehead. It’s painful to breathe.

Raptor Red’s sister sits down next to her oldest chick. For the first time since she met the male, she doesn’t want to bite him. And right this minute she could.

Raptor Red shows up a few minutes later. She heard the commotion from beyond a sand dune, where she was helping the other two chicks dismember this morning’s kill. Her genetically programmed behavior isn’t ready for the scene that greets her.

Her mate is lying hurt on the ground. Her sister is sitting next to him, at a loss as to what to think or do. The chick, rapidly recovering, is sniffing down a hole, trying to catch whatever was making such a fuss underground. And piles of panic-shit from an acrocanthosaur are spread all about.

The male raptor is depressed. He’s thinking something like this to himself: What a dope! Why did I do that? Ouch - what a dope - why did I do that - ouch! - the chick isn’t related - and Raptor Red didn’t even see it - ouch!

He sees Raptor Red coming toward him. His pupils contract and dilate, looking like the lens of an autofocus camera. It’s a reaction of extreme excitement - and joy.

When in doubt in a social situation, groom is Raptor Red’s unspoken motto. She sits between mate and sister, alternatively nuzzling each.