RAPTOR RED

CRETACEOUS WATER LANTERNS NOVEMBER

Raptor Red doesn’t know why the little chick is dead. Its body lies peacefully in the sand, as if it were napping, not far from the pack’s new seaside nest. Raptor Red thinks it is a pretty chick. She always liked it best of her sister’s three children.

Raptor Red very gently touches her upper lip against the chick’s chest. There’s no blood, no visible wound. But the body is cool and stiff. The chick lost an internal battle two hours ago, overcome by a runaway respiratory infection.

Raptor Red has seen death a thousand times. She’s watched dinosaur viscera ripped out of still-living bodies. Still, this Utahraptor chick is one of the saddest sights she has seen.

Her male consort is nervous - he doesn’t want to be blamed for the death - and he tries to make himself inconspicuous. He sees Raptor Red’s sister walking slowly toward him, and he hides between two small dunes.

The chick’s mother approaches Raptor Red and stops, looks at the adults, and stares at each of them, then sees the chick in the sand. Raptor Red’s body language tells her that the pack has suffered a loss.

Raptor Red’s sister comes up to the dead chick and begins to make crying sounds. Raptor Red tries to console her sister by cooing and nuzzling her neck and by leaning against her chest. But the bereaved mother starts to howl and shake, her eyes wild and wide. First her neck, then her shoulders and thighs tremble. The other young chick scrambles away in fear - she’s never seen her mother like this. The oldest chick joins Raptor Red in preening her mother.

It does no good. Raptor Red’s sister collapses on her ankles, pawing at the chick, turning the little corpse over and over until its hide is covered with wet sand grains. Raptor Red is afraid to leave her sister alone but afraid to stay next to her too. Her sister’s weird moaning gets louder, and she swings her arms in spastic arcs.

Raptor Red pushes her sister’s body with her own. She presses her head against her sister’s neck, trying to stop the shaking. It’s all she knows how to do. It’s the Utahraptor way of comforting a loved one.

Raptor Red feels her sister’s body go limp and start to fall away from her - and then it stops and stays still. Something is holding her sister up from the other side. Raptor Red looks over her sister’s shoulder to see what it is.

It’s her male consort.

He’s pushing gently and making cooing noises.

Raptor Red and her consort spend two hours holding her sister. Gradually the moaning grows quieter, the shaking stops, and Raptor Red’s sister closes her eyes and goes to sleep. Raptor Red’s consort drags over some branches to make a temporary nest right there. The entire pack huddles together when sunset comes. It’s a difficult night. Raptor Red has to groom her sister every time she wakes up.

The morning comes, and Raptor Red feels drained. Her sister is finally sound asleep, snoring noisily. The young male looks at Raptor Red - she’s sitting up with a dull, lifeless expression. He nudges her. Then he decides that he must get her a present.

Off to the beach he goes, sniffing and digging at curious objects half buried in the sand and mud. He needs something to cheer Raptor Red up. He needs play-food.

Over the last months he’s watched her enjoy herself many times, poking and nipping and clawing at strange food objects, creatures of bizarre shape and pungent taste. Fish heads, dried lizards, bloated fur-balls, fresh-water clams that no raptor can pry out of their shells. He’s learned that Raptor Red likes food that challenges her mind.

What he wants to find is some animal so weird that he himself would never think of eating it.

Smells of rotten and half-rotten sea-critters come up from the sand, but none seems quite right. Some are too gooey and sloppy. Some have hard-edged body parts that cut his lip when he tries to pick them up.

An eight-inch-long object, pointed at both ends, has promise. It smells fishy in a general sort of way, but it’s not like anything he’s eaten. And it has a very strange outer shell with hairs and pointed things sticking out. He taps the body with his hind-foot. To his immense surprise the pointed body runs sideways between his legs and under a rock.

Sideways running - weird, he thinks. Carefully he lifts up the rock, and the pointy thing runs sideways the other way.

Fhhhhwhop! He jumps on the sideways-creature, smushing it down into the mud. Bubbles come up. He fishes down to grab the thing - but the thing grabs him.

His index finger suffers a sudden sharp pain, and as he pulls his hand up, the crab holds on with one of its big, heavy pincher-claws. This is perfect, he thinks.

He runs back to where the family is sitting. Raptor Red’s sister is still snoring. The chicks are just waking up. He bobs his head at Raptor Red. She doesn’t look up. He drops the crab between her legs, and it scuttles straight up her chest.

Eeeeep! Raptor Red makes a little cry and stands up. Suddenly she’s out of her mood and into figuring out this new thing.

She chases the crab up the beach, and her consort chases it down. They push it down into the mud, and they dig it back up. He holds it against a rock, and she tries to pry into the crab’s shell with her thumb and her teeth.

At last she succeeds in popping the bottom shell off. Her male consort refuses to taste it, but Raptor Red immediately chews off pieces.

She likes it a lot.

The rest of the day is spent crab-catching and crab-eating. They catch them together, and Raptor Red eats every one.

Raptor Red and her consort spend the day with the chicks. It’s not a bad life at all, being a pack of beachcombers. The sea offers many gifts. The oldest chick finds the fresh carcass of a half-ton sea reptile, a streamlined body with two pairs of backswept flippers. The head was already gone - bitten off in some unseen mortal combat below the waves.

Raptor Red tastes the meat. It’s like crocodile, with a bit of the aftertaste of turtle. It’s not salty at all and just a little overripe. It will feed the pack for days.

As the sun sets, Raptor Red and her young male sit together along the beach, watching the breakers pound the Cretaceous pebbles into sand. Her sister is asleep again. The chicks have bellies full of scavenged seafood.

Raptor Red’s consort takes a walk down the coast - he doesn’t want to go to sleep just yet. Raptor Red follows. They find more free food: dead sea-crocodile, dead tarpon-fish, and dead saw-shark. The saw-shark is a bit strange - pungent and salty. Still, Raptor Red gives it a try even though she’s not hungry.

Raptor Red’s consort feels accepted now. He considers himself a full pack member. Over the last two months, as the pack made its way slowly to the sea, the bond between him and Raptor Red has become very strong.

The pack began its passage westward when conditions became intolerable in the open flood-plains of Utah. It was the exploding populations of acrocanthosaurs that pushed the raptors farther and farther toward the great western sea. At first Raptor Red’s sister growled and snapped at him every day. Then little by little, she became more tolerant.

Yesterday, when he leaned against Raptor Red’s sister, was the first time he had ever touched her without being bitten. He knows he’ll never really like Raptor Red’s sister, but he has learned to tolerate her and to work around her personality quirks and to avoid her when her bad moods set in. And he knows that Raptor Red appreciates his efforts.

The supply of sea-creature carcasses looks inexhaustible, and so to the young male, the prospect of being a dinosaurian beachbum seems splendid. He can raise a family here.

Raptor Red feels good despite her sadness at the loss of the chick. Her sister has stopped trying to kill her consort. That’s the firm foundation for a permanent, stable family life.

Their present situation is not without complications. They are not the only pack of raptors who has found the Pacific shore a safe haven from acros. The evening air is full of fresh scent.

Raptor Red catches sight of a pair of dinosaurs silhouetted against the setting sun. Utahraptors, strangers. The male sniffs and takes a few steps toward them. Raptor Red catches their scent signal. They’re females, unattached.

The young male stands for a long time, then comes back and sits at Raptor Red’s side, growling. The strangers lower their heads and withdraw. They do pause to dung-mark a sand dune. Raptor Red watches them until they are completely out of sight, and she and her consort settle down to listen to the ocean and watch.

Raptor Red stands up straight. She sees something totally new and perplexing. Phosphorescent green-yellow light is dancing just below the surface of the waters. Another burst of light comes from the left, and another from the right.

She and her consort walk slowly toward the surf. They jump back when the warm water washes over their feet. There are more flashes - a wide zone of flickering light dances across the water.

The raptor pair doesn’t swim out to satisfy their curiosity. The breaking waves scare them. And Raptor Red sees huge, dark shapes cruising just below the water’s surface - menacing shapes with eight-foot-long heads.

One of the lights starts to glow from a tidepool, and the raptors investigate. The male peers at the illumination that flickers across the rocky rim of the pool.

Raptor Red snaps her jaws at the light. She expects to feel the struggles of some unknown prey, wriggling to free itself from her teeth. Instead, she feels her lips coated with icky slime, like congealed fat.

She pulls her head back, coughs, and shakes her head. Bits of glowing green protoplasm fly away from her head and land on her consort’s feet. He rubs mud over his toes. Globs of goo cling to her gums.

She suddenly loses her temper at the lights. She hisses and coughs and wags her head up and down in a threat display. The jellyfish can’t see her.

Inside the tidepool a transparent phantom with long tentacles glows yellow-green. A dozen of the tentacles have been bitten off. Two dozen remain. The creature doesn’t think - it has no real brain, no center of rational analysis. Its nerve net responds to the shock of being attacked by sending messages to the swimming muscles. Its gelatinous body bumps against the rock walls of the pool.

A triple wave, made strong by the melding of multiple crests, sends a surge of water up the beach and over the tidepool. Raptor Red jumps straight up. A three-foot-thick wedge of salt water nearly knocks her off her feet. The glowing gelatin body is lifted up and carried back to the open ocean as the wave recedes.

Raptor Red and her consort watch the light sail out to sea. The jellyfish - a stingless species, part of the ctenophore clan - floats passively away, spared the slow death by desiccation that will end the lights of a hundred of its relatives who remain trapped on the beach.

An immense head rises smoothly above the surf ten yards away. A gigantic eye, unblinking, focuses on Raptor Red and her male. They backpedal up the beach. She’s afraid but overcome with curiosity.

SssssHHHWOOOOSH! An explosive cloud of foam covers Raptor Red. Salt spray stings her eyes. She’s aware of an immense presence waving its head just a few feet from hers. She smells fetid breath - the stench of a thousand fish and squid fermenting.

Raptor Red stumbles backward and sideways. The sea becomes calm. She blinks her-nictitating membrane across her eye. She brushes away wet sand from the corner of her eyelid.

Her eyes focus. Lying on the beach is twenty tons of sea-monster.

It’s a kronosaur.

The head, three yards long, swings left and right over a wide arc, throwing hundreds of pounds of sand into the early evening air. But the fearsome beast cannot advance an inch farther up the beach. It has gone as far beyond the water’s edge as its four flippered body shape will allow.

Raptor Red senses immediately that the behemoth from the sea is now no danger. While her consort snarls protectively, she examines this strange invader from another ecosystem carefully. It’s as big as an Astrodon but has a profoundly different body style.

The kronosaur emits a deep exhalation and then belches. A triple wave crashes over its back. The forry-foot-long body wriggles in a clumsy wide turn, like a multi-ton worm. The kronosaur bends its head back toward the sea. It cannot breathe out of water. It has lungs, but the crushing weight of gravity pulls its body bulk down onto the pulmonary chamber, squeezing the lung apparatus. The kronosaur’s flippers are not attached firmly to the backbone, so they cannot prop the body up against the sand.

A paroxysm of wriggles and head movements finally pull the kronosaur into the water.

Raptor Red watches and thinks.

When she is feeling well fed and content and well loved, her mental powers are allowed to indulge themselves. She can experiment.

She walks parallel to the shoreline, watching the waves carefully, focusing her eyes below the surface. She keeps her distance from the average line where the waves break.

There! She sees another huge shape cruising parallel to the shore. She watches - and a giant head breaks surface.

She stands on tiptoes, trying to look as tall as possible.

She waits… waits… waits…

Here it comes! she shouts to herself. She flexes her knees and ankles. An immense dark torpedo comes right at her, plowing through the breakers.

Just as the head and front flippers begin to slide up the beach, Raptor Red turns and jumps four strides diagonally, upslope and to her right.

Whhhmmmpp! The big kronosaur stops exactly on the spot where Raptor Red was standing a few seconds earlier.

Fsssshhhh! Foam and steam exit in two jets from the kronosaur’s nostrils, just in front of the eyes. The great sea-reptile pauses, then retreats awkwardly back to the water.

The male raptor is amazed.

Again Raptor Red plays her newly discovered game, Bait the Sea-Monster. She walks just close enough to the water to elicit an attack. But as soon as she sees the monstrous head breaking through the interface between water and beach, she retreats.

The male raptor understands the game, and he joins Raptor Red in teasing the king of the surf. Seven times they trick the kronos. These big beasts are slow to learn. The kronos' tactic of ambushing land animals close to the shoreline usually works, especially in the twilight. Many an iguanodon has been snatched to a saltwater tomb. Even twenty-ton astrodons have been dragged screaming into the surf.

But the kronos have never met quick-witted raptors before. At last, Raptor Red and her consort get bored and wander off to find something new to engage her interest.

As the last rays of the sun sink over the western horizon, there is a changing of the guard in the near-shore ocean realm. Great fourteen-foot fishes with shiny silver scales, like tarpon, retreat to quiet, deep water. Sea-reptiles with sharklike tails and flippers in place of legs seek kelp beds to spend the night. And a white-winged pterodactyl closes up his aerial fishing expeditions, carrying his final catch of fish toward his hungry offspring in the rookeries in the sandy shore.

The kronosaurs lie silent, resting.

It’s time for the armor-plated mollusks to ascend from the depths. It’s the time of tentacles.