RAPTOR RED

FURBALL LIBERATOR SEPTEMBER

Raptor Red doesn’t like to bed down on moist earth. None of her species does. They evolved in a dry climate, and their skin is designed to deal with exposure to sun and wind so severe that it would blister other dinosaurs' hides. Prolonged contact with moisture, on the other hand, can lead to a fungus infection and other, deadlier ills.

Raptor Red stands up and faces the early morning sun’s rays. She’s hot-blooded, bird-style, but even hot-bloods take advantage of solar warmth, especially after a damp, cool night. The young male struggles to his feet to join her. His ribs ache terribly, reminders of his run-in with the acro, but his legs are okay.

One of the chicks starts sniffing around, as young carnivores of many species do, looking for something to play with. He inhales some chewed-up bug parts that have a peppery taste. The chick sneezes loudly, waking up every other dinosaur for a half-mile radius. An acro family down the valley answers with a dull roar.

The whole raptor pack suns itself on the fallen tree for an hour, then trudges off to the west. They leave behind the remains of a swarm of assassin bugs, killed that night by the Aegialodon.

Raptor Red is vaguely aware that the slain legions of bugs give the air near the ground a strange scent. But she doesn’t think about it. Her acute vision focuses on the long, tubular bug-muzzles that lie like severed hypodermic needles everywhere. She doesn’t realize it, but those tiny arthropodous syringes can kill raptors by injecting them with biotoxins.

Raptor Red has been bitten by syringe-snouted bugs before. They usually sneak in at night Or during rest time, when the raptor pack is lying in the shade. They come for blood. The bugs prick the dinosaurs' hide, suck for a half hour, and drop off.

Raptor Red tries to avoid the bugs - they leave itchy sores that can lead to infections. But her innate fear of bugs has another, far more profound motivation: Dinosaurs who ignore bugs have died out from infections. Syringe-snouts are vectors of plague.

The Cretaceous bugs the aegi killed carried a deadly virus that is fatal to raptors. The disease and the bugs evolved in Europe, and the bugs hitchhiked on astros when those vegetarian giants passed over a land bridge that connected Europe to Greenland and Greenland to eastern Canada. Once in the New World, the bugs and their microbial fellow travelers ran amok, spreading everywhere, because there was no native predator who could handle them.

Fortunately for Raptor Red, her part of the American ecosystem has a natural control agent - a species of Aegialodon who specializes in eating just this general type of bug species.

By sheer bad luck, Raptor Red and her pack bedded down just where there was an infestation of Cretaceous assassin bugs, every one carrying plague. However, good luck balanced bad. The Aegialodon and his brothers and sisters had colonized this piece of ground recently too. In one night the furry bug boppers slaughtered thousands of assassin bugs. In another few years, the plague-carrying insects will be reduced to a few refugee pockets scattered here and there in Utah.

Sometimes it works out this way. More often it doesn’t. The invading pest spreads, unchecked. Horrible epidemics result, and the native fauna is devastated. That’s why Utahraptor females reject any male who appears to be bug-infested.

Raptor Red and her pack were lucky - very lucky.

The big ostrich dino hen is cocking her head from one side to the other. She lowers her neck so her ears are close to the ground.

Her ears are the best of all the Early Cretaceous Dinosauria - better than Raptor Red’s. They have to be. The ostrich dino ear must detect the faintest scrambling noise of underground prey.

The ostrich dino hen puts her outer eardrum an inch from the soil. The eardrum vibrates, amplifying the subsurface sound, sending vibrations through the thin ear bone, which amplifies some more. Instantly the inner eardrum receives the amplified signals and sets up waves through the fluid in the inner ear.

This is a battle of ear versus ear. Below ground, furball ears are straining to follow the movements of their huge enemies topside.

It’s an even match. Both furball and ostrich dino have a long, coiled inner ear canal where fluid waves move tiny hairs that trigger electrical impulses to the brain. The longer the coil, the wider the range of frequencies the brain can hear. Both fur-ball and ostrich dino hear high frequencies well.

The aegi is awake. The soft tread of the ostrich hen was enough to rouse the furball from his morning slumber. The other aegis are awake too. They don’t like ostrich dinos - to the aegis, the big hen is the Terror From Above.

The ostrich dino hen pokes her head up to do an antipredator scan. Far to the south are some acros. Not close enough to be a danger. Far to the west is a dust cloud marking where a family group of predators is marching away.

She sniffs - there’s just the faintest scent of giant raptors. She shudders involuntarily.

But the raptors are too far away to waste time worrying. She puts her head down again, cocks her ears, and listens.

A very light rustling noise comes from six inches below. She squats on her long ankle pads and braces her torso with her tail.

She jabs her three-fingered forepaws down into the earth.

Her long, straight claws go down vertically, probing the earth. These claws don’t have the wicked meat-hook curve a raptor claw has. Instead, the ostrich dino’s hand is a garden tool, a combination three-pronged spade and rake.

Her three claws are almost the same length, a unique hand pattern for dinosaurs. Usually the thumb is far shorter than the other two fingers - raptor hands are built that way. The three equal claws give the ostrich dino hen better probing efficiency, because all three points reach down to about the same level.

Squeak. A tiny voice betrays its owner. It’s a mistake - if the furball hadn’t squeaked when the claw brushed past its shoulder, the little mammal would have lived.

The hen stares from one side. Then the other.

Her eyelids blink the dust away.

THNKTHNK! Both hands go down. Six straight claws penetrate on either side of where the squeak came from.

Down in its burrow the aegi feels the floor of his living chamber crumble and rise up. The burrow walls collapse, letting in bright sunlight. The sun fills the burrow in a painful explosion of white beams. The furball’s eye can’t take such a frontal attack of solar radiation.

He closes his eyes, turns around, and tries to dig deeper. Too late - six claws lift him bodily. He tries to wriggle through the space between two claw tips. But the hen brings her palms together and the claws make a dreadfully effective cage, trapping the fur-ball inside.

The ostrich dino hen examines her prize. The fur-ball squints and can just barely see the outline of the hen’s bulging forehead.

Gulp! The hen tosses the furball into her mouth and gobbles him down.

On to the next burrow the hen goes. Another fur-ball is detected, excavated, analyzed, and gobbled.

And another.

Deep in his renovated burrow the scorpion-killer aegi sits. He feels the tremors coming closer. The burrow next to his - his brother’s - suffers a rumbling attack. He hears a squeak. The scorpion-killer knows that the Terror From Above has scored another victim.

Sunlight stabs at his eyes. He’s lifted. The Terror From Above pushes its giant mouth next to him. He sees the giant jaws open.

The aegi’s jaws strike blindly and gnash twenty tiny holes in the dino hen’s cheek. Then the aegi locks his jaws onto a flap of ostrich dino lip, hanging on.

The ostrich dino hen grunts in disgust. She doesn’t like her brunch to bite back. She shakes her head.

The scorpion-killer feels himself being propelled a hundred body lengths. He falls. He scrambles toward the scent of his burrow. He reaches the edge of the hole, now churned up by the hen’s claws.

The hen drives all six claws down hard. They come up holding a wriggling piece of prey. She’s more careful this time. She doesn’t put her nose right up to her claw trap.

She flips the little body into the air.

Gulp!

Yeaccch!

It’s a frog. There’s nothing wrong with frogs for brunch, but she was expecting the taste of furball. Oh well, one gulp is as good as another.

Still, she pauses a minute, thinking, I grabbed a fur-ball - tossed it - it became a frog. Never saw that happen before.

If she were interested in metaphysics, she might invent the first dinosaur religion then and there. Instead she moves on, hunting, digging, and gulping.

Aegialodon the scorpion-killer stays absolutely still. He’s survived, and he’ll live to a ripe old age -eleven months. By that time his aegi genes will be in swarms of children and grandchildren.

Over a hundred million years later, the flow of aegi genes will produce wonderful creations -giraffes, elephants, rhinos, whales, bats, monkeys, chimps, Democratic senators, Republican majority leaders. Charles Darwin himself. All can be traced back to the supreme bug bopper, the Aegialodon.