RAPTOR RED

DEATH FROM THE SEA DECEMBER

The old white-winged dactyl awakens early, to take advantage of the exceptionally fine masses of air rising over the beach. Sitting at the edge of his nest, he opens and closes his twenty-foot wings slowly, stretching the thick wing-finger tendons at the four joints, getting the winter night out of his muscle fibers. This is his preflight warmup.

The entire wing is held by just a single great finger, number four counting from the thumb outward. He adheres to a strict program of exercises to limber up the living machinery that will keep that finger operating in peak condition once he is aloft.

He tests the air and turns his body upwind. He props his torso up at an angle, holding on to the nest with the three small hooklike claws on each wrist, and folds his wing tight against his body. He flexes his knees and elbows and wrist, lowering his body.

Then he jumps, hurling himself off the edge of the cliff.

His body plummets down fifteen feet, gathering momentum. Just as he seems doomed to crash into the surf, his flight-finger muscles contract at the elbow and shoulder, putting tension on the thick finger tendon. The muscle force instantly is passed outward as the tendon flips open the four finger joints and locks the wing in extended position. Air flows over the top wing surface, creating lift.

The dactyl hears a whoosh of air generating the force that pulls the wing up. His body tilts. He’s airborne.

Automatically he twists one wing finger up and one down and banks into a spiral-climbing turn. It takes a full minute to make a complete circle, and another, and another, and another.

The circles get wider as he ascends. He enjoys the feeling of effortless upward flight. At fifteen hundred feet the light of the rising sun hits his wings and floods his body tissue with warmth. This is the moment he likes best. His circulatory system responds, opening capillaries close to the skin so the solar energy can be absorbed.

The dactyl banks steeply, and the wind sends him scooting at high speed parallel to the shore. It’s exhilarating.

At ground level it’s still dark. But the rising sun is yet below the horizon. The dactyl’s acute eyesight lets him see shapes and movement on the dimly lit beach. He likes to check out the situation on the ground at this time of day.

He can see two Utahraptor packs. One is made up of his old friends, Raptor Red and her sister, and

Raptor Red’s male consort, plus one large and one small chick. The other pack has three young adults and is camped a half-mile away. The white dactyl swoops lower to inspect Raptor Red’s pack. They are up and awake and milling around. Their movement patterns are awkward and violent and uncoordinated. That’s not how a well-organized raptor pack should look.

The dactyl sees movement in the deep shadows behind the beach, in the hollows between the lines of sand dunes. Two very large dark shapes are inching up the dune face toward the raptors. He knows what that sort of movement means - giant predators are stalking the raptors. And the raptors don’t know it.

On a normal morning one adult raptor would be on sentry duty, sitting on the dune crest to prevent a surprise attack. Today all three adults are circling each other on the beach, ignorant of the danger from the dune field.

The old dactyl has a fondness for Raptor Red and her pack. He thinks of them as his Utahraptors. They’ve been his meal ticket for several years - as were Raptor Red’s parents before them. It’s not that he views them as his family - he has a subconscious knowledge that raptors have no significant genetic ties with his own kind. But he has bonded, at a distance, to this raptor group. He views them as the living center of his territory.

He banks very steeply and dives. At thirty feet he levels out, gravity giving him sixty-mile-per-hour velocity. Sand grains are whipped into the air by his slipstream as he skips over the dune crests. A three-ton body flattens itself onto the dune as the dactyl buzzes the last crest before the beach.

The dactyl gives a high-pitched alarm call. He expects an instant response. The raptors have learned that he doesn’t give alarms in jest.

The raptors ignore him.

Raptor Red’s sister should be the morning sentry. On most days she wakes up earlier than the rest of the pack, and she’s naturally suspicious of any unknown sight or sound or scent. But this morning she woke up in an angry state of mind. For no particular reason - other than the fact that she still finds his presence irritating - she walked over to where the young male was sleeping and bit him.

He snarled and withdrew to the foot of the big dune. Now he is walking back and forth, half awake, growling softly. He didn’t sleep well. All the strange sounds coming from beyond the dunes bothered him. Strange Utahraptors came and went and left scent-signals. Even worse was the faint smell of giant predators. He hoped they would be free of acros forever.

Raptor Red is standing between her sister and her consort. She hates being in this position. She’s making soft gurgling noises, looking back and forth at the two creatures she loves most in the world.

The older chick is next to her mother, hissing loudly with all the bluster adolescents have when they mimic adult behavior.

Raptor Red walks slowly, deliberately to her sister and nudges her. Her sister stops making threatening motions and turns abruptly away.

One crisis dealt with, Raptor Red turns to the young male. He’s busy testing the morning air with his snout. Raptor Red sniffs too. Her heart sinks. There it is again - the scent of female Utahraptors, strangers.

The young male rises very tall and sniffs. Then there’s an awkward silence as he stares at Raptor Red. He comes over and gives her a snout nuzzle. It doesn’t last long, and he walks away.

This complex social drama has occupied the entire pack. They’re not as vigilant as they would be if they were a stable family.

A huge acrocanthosaur is sitting behind the crest of a pale yellow sand dune. Her three-ton body is hidden from the beach. Since the sun rose an hour ago, she’s been watching the raptor family wake up slowly from their temporary nest not far from the water’s edge. The wind is with her - it’s blowing in from the shore.

This acro is a mature adult. She has chicks back in a nest two miles away. And there’s nothing an acro mother hates more than a pack of raptors near her family. Raptors are the deadliest menace to other predators' chicks. Raptors are nest-raiders.

The acro’s mate crawls up next to her. He stares down at the beach. The two acros are looking for the right moment to leap over the dune crest and attack the raptor family, but they’re momentarily puzzled. Something strange is happening among the raptors.

Raptor Red stands frozen in fear, her head trembling. Tiny pathetic squeaks are coming from her throat. Her pupils are dilated even though the morning sun is bright. She’s staring at her sister, who is staring at the male raptor.

The male raptor has the little raptor chick in his mouth. It’s squealing.

He didn’t plan to do it. The chick was getting on his nerves, playing games with his tail. Usually the male’s strong attachment to Raptor Red modulates his urge to bite the chick in half. His strongest instinct is to please Raptor Red - so she’ll agree to have chicks with him.

But not this morning. The chick has been too obnoxious. Its mother has been too bloody-minded. And the male is just too edgy. The final insult came when the chick tried to bite him, just as its mother had. The chick imitated its mother too precisely - for a second the male thought Raptor Red had not one, but two hellish sisters.

That’s a thought that makes him lose control.

So he didn’t exactly intend to grab the chick in his mouth. He snapped at it to keep it away from his tail. But the chick zigged in the wrong direction, and the male’s jaws, almost by accident, closed tight on the chick’s calf.

Now the chick is screaming. The male’s jaws tighten just a bit, then relax.

He’s fighting instinct with reason. His reflex emotions say, Bite hard and get it over with. His rational inner voice says, Drop the chick and act submissive.

Raptor Red is afraid for the chick. It’s her niece, and blood ties are strong. But she’s even more afraid her sister will rip the male to pieces.

Raptor Red’s sister stands on her tiptoes, making herself look as tall as possible. Ripples of muscle contraction pass through her entire body until every ounce of body mass is tensed.

She’s uttering a low, guttural snarl.

Raptor Red advances slowly toward her sister, keeping her head close to the ground. It’s a walk of appeasement, the submissive display of a sibling trying to defuse a deadly situation.

The male looks at Raptor Red, then at her sister. He’s frozen where he is, unable to move.

Suddenly, Raptor Red’s sister slashes out with her left hand. Raptor Red staggers. She looks down at her elbow, where a fresh wound is beginning to bleed. Raptor Red sinks down on her knees. She’s never, NEVER been struck in anger by her sister before. She doesn’t know what to do.

Then a cloud of sand comes flying into Raptor Red’s face, stinging her eyes. She blinks hard. She sees a blur of hindfeet churning up the beach. Her sister is charging the male.

Raptor Red tries to run to cut her off, but the sand is so soft, it’s impossible to accelerate fast, and she stumbles.

Her sister is coming at the male with her arms flailing. He drops the chick, who runs away toward the surf, splashing out until the water is lapping at her knees. She focuses her eyes at her mother and doesn’t notice the dark mass breaching the surface, gliding toward shore, out beyond where the waves start to break.

There’s a gentle disturbance in the surface as the immense body changes course and steers directly at the chick.

The male raptor turns and starts running uphill. Raptor Red’s sister tries to follow but slips and skids sideways down the sand dune. Raptor Red sprints between them. She stops, looking in panic both up - and downhill. But then she doesn’t know what to do. Her sister gets up and just misses Raptor Red with a swipe of her fore-paw.

Out of the corner of her eye, Raptor Red sees the body shadow of a sea-monster coming at the chick.

She gives the alarm call, but her sister ignores it and begins to climb the dune after the male. In the next instant, an avalanche of sand bowls the male and Raptor Red’s sister over. They lie sputtering at the foot of the dune. A four-foot-long head juts out from the dune crest and snarls. Then the neck and shoulders emerge. Then the massive thighs of the acrocanthosaur.

Raptor Red screams another alarm call. The chick standing in the surf sees the acro and backs out further into the water, unknowingly putting herself in an ideal spot to be attacked by the sea-monster. The chick is now in water up to her hips and she’s having a hard time staying upright in the tidal surge.

Raptor Red’s sister is lying on her back, half buried in the dune. The male acro is crashing clumsily down through the sand. The sister looks at the acro, then at the male raptor, then back at the acro.

She twists her body around and attacks the male raptor.

Raptor Red yells in exasperation. The hoarse scream means You IDIOT!

Raptor Red grabs her sister’s tail and drags her down the slope. The charging acro pauses. He’s confused by all the raptors yelling at each other. It seems to be some newfangled group defense he’s never seen before.

The female acro walks briskly along a diagonal route across the dune face. She’s older and wiser than her consort. She knows sand and she knows raptors. She knows that the raptor pack is fighting among themselves.

Raptor Red recognizes immediately that the female acro is the real threat to her sister and the male raptor. But the giant sea-reptile is closing in on the raptor chick.

For a horrible second Raptor Red is sure she’s going to lose her mate, her sister, and her niece.

But then the thought strikes. Her brain puts two things together.

Raptor Red charges the female acro, screaming her loudest. She brushes past the snapping acro muzzle. A mouthful of four dozen enormous ivory teeth, each saw-edged, clamps shut a few inches from Raptor Red’s skin.

Raptor Red whirls and strikes. Her index finger makes a shallow but painful cut on the acre’s upper lip.

The female acro blinks hard. She looks at the male raptor and at Raptor Red’s sister, hissing at each other as they retreat to the left. Then the acro looks at Raptor Red, yelling defiantly to the right, at the edge of the water.

The acro runs after Raptor Red. I’ve got it cornered - its back is against the sea, the acro thinks to herself.

And the charging acro does close the distance rapidly. Raptor Red splashes noisily out into the salt water.

I’ve got it -1 can wade out farther than she can! The acro’s brain sends messages of confidence to her legs.

Raptor Red turns and runs through the water, parallel to shore. She passes the raptor chick, frozen in fear, and knocks it down.

The acro ignores the chick and follows Raptor Red through the surf. The long, strong acro shins and ankles slosh through the water with ease.

The distance is down to a few yards. Another second, and I’ll strike, the acro thinks. Her sensory system preps her neck and jaws.

The acro snaps her neck backward into a tight S-curve. Muscle groups work against each other -tensing the head and neck and torso. The whole joint-muscle apparatus is a coiled weapon, ready to fire and send the jaws down and forward.

KAWOOOOOOSH! Raptor Red is knocked backward. Her head goes six feet under. Her muzzle drags along the bottom. Wet sand is stuffed up her nostrils.

KAWOOOOOOOSH! A second explosive force sends tons of water over her, rolling her body along the bottom.

Salt water clogs her throat.

Five more surges keep her from grabbing the bottom with her hindclaws.

Raptor Red jabs all six of her foreclaws into a clump of brown seaweed. Then she jams one set of hindclaws in between two submerged rocks. She sticks her head and neck up as far as they’ll go.

Her nostrils break the surface. She spits out green water and a mouthful of salty mud. Her right eye opens just above the surface.

Drops of hot blood spatter the water all around her. She looks around. It’s a hideous sight.

Streams of bright red arterial blood are squirting up from the surface. The acro has a huge open wound in the thorax that exposes three broken ribs and lacerated viscera. A hindleg, dislocated at the knee, flaps about in uncoordinated spasms.

A three-yard-long kronosaur snout swings viciously to the side, seizing the acrocanthosaur leg and spinning the acro body beneath the waves.

Raptor Red struggles to the shore and looks back. The acrocanthosaur surfaces again, her left thigh and shin flexing convulsively. The kronosaur shifts his jaws up his victim’s body, clamping his giant tooth-row across the acro’s neck. The krone’s flippers on the right side tilt upward as he dives to his left, dragging the acro down again.

Back on shore the raptor chick who had been in the water rushes up to the sand dune. Both raptor chicks huddle next to their mother.

The male acro on the beach has sat down. He’s staring at the water’s surface where his mate disappeared. He sees the acro resurface a hundred yards farther out. This time her body is nearly limp. There’s just a faint hint of movement in the corner of the mouth.

Raptor Red walks out of the surf. She’s very happy. And she’s proud of herself too. This is the best victory she’s scored in her life as a predator. It’s better than bringing down an iguanodon. It’s better than a group assault on a twenty-ton astro.

This time she beat an acrocanthosaur with her brain, not her claws.

She trots up the sand dune diagonally.

The male acro has already retreated to the dune crest. He catches one last glimpse of his mate, two hundred yards out, her body is being spun around by the thirty-ton kronosaur.

The acro male is unhurt, but his spirit is gone. He trudges away in retreat.

Raptor Red follows cautiously. She watches the acro grow smaller and smaller until he vanishes beyond the next line of dunes. She looks down. Her sister is calling to her. Raptor Red joins the two chicks in an orgy of snout rubs and reciprocal grooming. Everyone seems in splendid shape.

Raptor Red jerks her head up and sniffs. Her good mood disappears. She trots back up to the dune crest and surveys the landscape.

There! she says to herself. There he is.

She can see her male consort two hundred yards away to the north. She’s confused. Is he afraid? Does he know we won? She calls to him. He doesn’t respond. She calls again. He’s moving.

He’s trotting away from her.

Raptor Red stretches her muzzle high and makes a single piercing call.

The male freezes. He turns his head. Maybe he’s making a return call, but Raptor Red can’t hear it.

Maybe that’s not him, she thinks. She sniffs and stares and sniffs again. No doubt about it, that’s her male’s distinctive smell.

The male is standing still, looking back at her. This has happened before - he’ll come back, Raptor Red thinks.

She detects something else in the air - the scent of female Utahraptors, the group of strangers camping nearby.

Far to the north she can see them, tiny figures making slow body movements.

Raptor Red does not know what to do next.

She stands quietly and watches the young male turn and walk quickly north.

Raptor Red stays there, high on the dune crest, for five hours. His scent gets fainter and fainter. He’s not coming back.