RAPTOR RED

SEGNO CAVES JANUARY

Raptor Red pauses to catch her breath. The mountain air takes getting used to. She knows that they are traveling north. North is the direction she and her original mate came from three and a half long years ago. Now she and her sister and the two chicks are going north involuntarily. It’s the only direction that seems free of acrocanthosaur hordes.

A week after Raptor Red lured the female acro to her death in the surf, three more family groups of acros showed up on the beach. It was too much for Raptor Red and her sister to deal with. Winds from the north were free of acro scent, so the raptor pack went north.

And up. The Utahraptor family’s flight leads them to higher and higher elevations, far higher than Raptor Red has ever been.

After a long day of zigzagging up a mountain valley, Raptor Red’s sister nuzzles her. It surprises Raptor Red. Her sister is not the huggy type.

Her sister’s mind is usually a muddle of conflicting rages that she can barely control. She fears and hates the smell of other raptors. She’s driven to apoplectic anger when she senses acrocanthosaurs nearby. And she flails her arms in frustration when the physical elements go against her - when it’s too windy or too rainy or too hot.

One central purpose holds her thoughts together: protect her chicks, protect her family, protect her sister.

Now penetrating through her paranoid and frequently frantic intellectual fog is the realization that Raptor Red is sad. And Raptor Red’s sister has finally figured out that this sadness began when the young male left.

To Raptor Red’s sister, the young male was a dangerous annoyance. She hated him from day one. She wanted to get rid of him. She never could figure out why Raptor Red protected him.

She still doesn’t understand. But she wants to make Raptor Red feel better, so she nuzzles and gurgles awkwardly. She’s trying hard, but her instinctive skills of comforting a sibling are poorly developed.

Raptor Red turns away. She still blames her sister for depriving her of her young mate.

Her sister follows, making exaggerated submissive movements with head very low. She’s not very good at it. She’s had little practice in submission rituals.

Her clumsiness eventually causes her to run her snout directly into a fallen log. She trips, tries to regain her balance by digging her left forepaw into the ground, tumbles over herself, and lands on her back with a sour look on her face.

If evolution had given Raptor Red a full set of lip muscles, she’d smile.

She moves over to her sister and gracefully caresses her neck and shoulders.

Raptor Red lets her sister make all the decisions now. She’s the pack leader. And the pack continues to go up, climbing the seaward side of a mountain range clothed in heavy forests of tree ferns and tall conifer trees. The air becomes clearer, fresher, and much colder, especially at night.

Raptor Red pauses to stick her snout high in the breeze. Yes indeed, there are no acrocanthosaurs here. She sniffs again and sighs. There are no Utahraptor males either.

The pack feasts on a dead iguanodon they find covered by fallen leaves. Raptor Red winces when she cuts the meat with her teeth. The iguanodon’s flesh feels hard and cold against her gums. She tastes ice crystals in the connective tissue.

Raptor Red’s sister looks up at the sky. Her keen eyes follow something small and light falling in irregular spirals. Maybe a bug.

Snap! She jumps up and bites at the whitish fleck. No taste. No crunch.

Another whitish speck comes down. She watches, stone still, to see what the bug will do.

She takes a very shallow breath. The bug zips into her nostril and dissolves immediately, leaving a cold, wet sensation for a split second.

Cold bug. Strange, she thinks to herself.

The night becomes frigid, but the sisters find abundant pine needles to build a temporary nest, and the older chick helps like an adult in this housekeeping chore. The scent and sounds coming from the montane forests show that there’s plenty of game.

One of their local neighbors is a small iguanodon species with a spotted hide who runs in big herds and is easy to kill.

The pack wakes up to a heavy fog clinging to the ground. Raptor Red’s sister is thirsty. Up ahead is a pond nestled among lichen-covered boulders. She trots ahead of the rest of the pack and squats down.

But as she stoops to drink, she whacks herself against a rock, bruising her nostril. At least that’s what she thinks.

She examines the pond edge carefully. There are no rocks in sight.

Again she stoops, and again she whacks herself.

She growls at the water. She hisses. The water doesn’t ripple at all.

Weird water, she thinks. Bad water.

She reaches out to scratch the pond. Her middle finger hits the surface and bounces off.

Now she stands up and screeches a full threat.

Raptor Red and the older chick rush up to help defend her.

Raptor Red’s sister reacts the way she always does. She thrusts her right hindfoot at the pond. I’ll fix you - I’ll rip you open with my killing claw, she’s thinking.

Her claw hits the pond and slides forward. She slips and falls on her rump. She expects a splash. She gets a knock on her dinosaurian derriere instead.

Raptor Red is very curious about this strange hard water. She takes a more inquisitive, less confrontational approach to the problem than her sister. She presses one foot hard against the water’s surface where some reeds are growing. Cold water oozes up alongside the reeds.

CRACK! A jagged piece of water breaks off. Raptor Red backs up. She’s never seen water act like this.

She sniffs. She nudges the water with her snout. Then she bites tentatively at a piece. She tries to drop the piece of water, but it sticks to her lip. She shakes her head and the piece of ice drops and shatters against a rock.

Late that afternoon, it snows.

Raptor Red watches, fascinated, as the wet, cold, fluffy layer gets thicker and thicker on the ground. The small chick huddles against her side, shivering. Shivering is why Raptor Red’s pack can survive in this climate - it turns up their internal thermostat so heat production from body tissue increases.

Raptor Red has noticed that the ponds and rivers here are devoid of crocodiles and turtles that are so common at lower elevations. Crocs and turtles can’t shiver.

Raptor Red’s sister doesn’t like the snow, and all her growling and hissing just seems to make the snow come down faster. She glances at her chicks. Both are now shivering next to their aunt.

Must find a hole, the chicks' mother thinks to herself. Raptor Red’s sister has always been the best of the pack in finding holes to hide in.

She sets out with grim determination. Cold can be as dangerous to chicks as an acrocanthosaur. She needs a burrow to shield her family.

For three hours the pack searches for shelter. The snow gets heavier, and the younger chick is having a hard time as it high-steps through the freezing mixture of mud and slush.

The raptors' thighs and shins are in no danger of freezing because the blood vessels are arranged to save heat. Arteries with hot blood going down the legs pass alongside veins coming up from the feet carrying blood chilled by the cold ground. The heat is transferred from the descending hot flow to the ascending cold.

That way the upper legs don’t get drained of body heat.

The foot tissue itself can operate at very low temperatures. It’s a trick that the raptors' relatives, the birds, also have. But the belly tissue of the little chick has no such protection, and it’s in imminent danger of frostbite.

The chick whines and stuffs its nose into Raptor Red’s armpit. Raptor Red starts to worry. She realizes that the chick could die in another hour or so.

Raptor Red follows her sister as the visibility drops to zero in the swirling snow. The cold, heavy flakes whacking into her eyeballs makes Raptor Red close her eyelids so only a narrow slit remains to see through. Her sister goes up through a heavily wooded ridge and then stops when a heavy, pungent odor causes her nostrils to twitch. The smell is foreign - and warm.

Her sister growls under her breath and advances through the dense conifer needles.

A strange noise comes from a crevice in the rocky ledge ahead. A pair of pale blue eyes stares out from the dark interior of a cavern.

Raptor Red and her sister advance side by side into the mouth of the hole. The blue eyes retreat.

Raptor Red feels the faint swoosh of air that a claw makes. She stoops, and a trio of long, straight claws just miss her head.

Only a moment passes, and then she hears her sister attack in the darkness. There’s a heavy thumping noise. Then a screech.

Raptor Red can smell blood. It’s her sister’s. But she can’t see a thing in the cave.

She sniffs and slowly walks farther into the darkness. It’s very quiet. She bumps into something inert, a big lifeless body that smells of earth and conifer roots. Her sister is already chewing on the strange carcass.

The morning breaks cold but clear. Warm red light seeps into the cave. Raptor Red wakes up and checks on the chicks. They’re both still snoring little raptor snorts, half buried in a nest of conifer bark.

Her sister is already up and out and feeding on the dead segnosaur carcass.

Raptor Red comes out to investigate. The segnosaur has a smell totally foreign to the raptor’s olfactory memory bank. And its shape is bizarre. The long neck and small head with weak teeth are like an ostrich dino’s. But the awkward-looking body with wide, spreading hindfeet is thoroughly un-ostrich-dino. And the hands - the hands have huge, straight claws for digging.

The cave is the segnosaur’s home. It dug out an elaborate tunnel system to escape the worst of the snowy weather. Segnos are the only dino family specialized for major excavation. Right now, in the

Early Cretaceous, segnos are montane rarities -species that can be found only at high altitudes. This mountain-loving habit has kept them from meeting the normal inhabitants of the lowlands, like Utahraptor.

Raptor Red’s family has no experience to guide them in dealing with segnos, and no instinct either. Segno front claws are dangerous slashing weapons - Raptor Red’s sister was very lucky.

Raptor Red gives the segno’s body a thorough sniff-search and visual examination. Her olfactory inventory doesn’t detect any sign of poison. She takes a bite of the liver that her sister has dragged out of the carcass.

Raptor Red notices her sister’s wound: a deep gash over the waist, just in front of the left hip. When her sister shifts her weight, the wound bleeds.

The cave proves to be a splendid lair for the raptor clan. The two adults can go out hunting whenever it’s sunny - and that’s every other day or so. And whenever the snow begins again, the four raptors can snuggle in the bark bedding that the segnosaur had gathered.

Raptor Red is aware that her sister walks with a limp. The wound has scabbed over, but Raptor Red can see that it still causes pain. Her sister refuses to stay in the cave to let the wound heal and insists on going on every hunt.

Raptor Red worries about her sibling. She hasn’t seen her injured before, and it changes her attitude toward her own responsibility in life. Raptor Red takes on more of the maternal duties - grooming the chicks, making sure that they don’t fight too much over food brought in for them. It’s not that the chicks are especially lovable now - just the reverse. At this stage in her development, the older chick is just adult enough to be obnoxious and irritating. She can run around as fast as Raptor Red, but her mind is still a chick’s half the time. She has no sense of how serious life is, how dangerous it can be.

The older chick constantly teases the younger chick. And both chicks tease the adults, nipping at tails and screeching.

In raptor years the older chick is a teenager, that time when physical energy far exceeds common sense.

The mountain fauna is full of many surprises. The dactyls are different here, smaller and faster on the wing. There are more birds. There are exotic dinosaur species - and some of them are dangerous. The scent-signals are hard for Raptor Red to decipher. There is raptor sign in many places - from deinonychs and Utahraptors - but the identity of the dung-signers is hard to read because the cold nights freeze the dung-marks, erasing much of the information.

Raptor Red and her sister leave their marks on tree trunks: they place a dung-sign at the base, then reach as high as they can and scratch long wounds in the bark with their foreclaws.

Any other raptor can read the message: We’re Utahraptor sisters, and we’re this tall, so keep away!

At the beginning of their second month on the mountain, Raptor Red notices a new and strange behavior being practiced by her sister. It starts with her sister snuffling the soil with intense olfactory energy, then stamping her foot, growling, pawing dirt over a spot on the ground, and running.

Raptor Red has been assuming that it’s a danger sign and has been running off with her sister every time. But the sixth time her sister repeats the performance, Raptor Red gets suspicious. Instead of running away, she goes back to the spot where her sister pawed the earth.

Despite her sister’s growls, Raptor Red sniff-searches the area. There’s a lingering scent, a familiar one. She claws the earth, overturning the sod and releasing more aroma.

It’s male Utahraptor sign - her male consort!

Raptor Red claws the ground furiously and reply-marks the spot with her dung-sign. Then she glares at her sister, who has assumed a nonchalant posture and refuses to make eye contact. She tries to look busy scanning the meadow ahead for imaginary iguanodon herds.

If raptors had complex facial muscles, her sister would be wearing a sheepish expression.

Raptor Red charges and bumps her sister so hard on the rump that both of them tumble head over tail. For the rest of the day, Raptor Red ignores her sister, refusing to return head-bobs or muzzle-rubs.

It’s not the last time Raptor Red finds fresh sign from her young male on the ground and in the bark of trees.

Eeeep … ssssswsh … bmp-bmp-bmpity-bmp.

It’s a sound Raptor Red hasn’t heard before, ever.

Eeeeeeeep … sssssssswsh.

They’re squeals of delight, like a raptor chick playing with its mother’s tail, but even higher-pitched.

Eeeeep— BUMP!

Something alive, something tiny - something is playing over there beyond the pine trees, where the ground slopes away for a hundred yards.

Raptor Red glances at her sister. She has a very curious expression on her face. Not a snarl, or a look of fear, or even an appearance of perplexity. Something else.

Her sister gets up from where the pack has been resting in front of the cave and walks quickly toward the noise. Raptor Red follows.

A iguanodon-herd path snakes through the trees, making a tunnel seven feet tall and three feet wide, where the underbrush has been beaten down by countless generations of herbivore hooves. Ordinarily raptors are cautious when they negotiate this passage - there’s always the danger of meeting a rogue bull iguanodon. But now Raptor Red watches her sister bound through the opening and disappear.

Carefully, pausing at each step, Raptor Red goes through the tunnel. She hates this place. It gives her a weird feeling.

Noises come from the other end of the tunnel -shrill, scary, unnatural calls, vaguely like her sister’s victory whoop but distorted.

Raptor Red is afraid some horrible herbivore is trampling her sibling slowly, causing inconceivable pain. She stands still for a moment, gathering her courage, and plunges out of the passage into the open space beyond.

And there she’s struck dumb by the extraordinary sight.

EEEEEEEP… whoopwhoop-whoooop!

Her sister is sliding down the snowy slope on her back, gurgling and calling like a maniac. She lands at the base of the slope and continues to scoot across the meadow, coming to rest in a mound of crushed saplings. Eeeeeep! Still upside down and lacking any shred of raptor dignity, she calls to Raptor Red.

Eeep. Raptor Red makes a weak reply. What is she doing? She begins to suspect her sibling has caught the mad raptor disease, a malady that makes carnivorous dinosaurs run in circles, growling at themselves, until they fall over.

There’s a flurry of movement at the top of the slope. Raptor Red’s sister isn’t the only predator enjoying the snow slide. A troop of tro-odonts, small raptorlike meat-eaters about forty pounds in weight, are running up to the edge, jumping into the air, and landing on their backsides.

Tro-odonts are slender-snouted bug-eaters and chasers of small furballs. Raptor Red has always ignored them. They pose no danger to raptor chicks, and no competition for game.

Eeeeep … eeeeep … eeeeeep.

It’s the tro-odonts who are emitting the high-pitched calls Raptor Red heard before she came through the trees.

Her sister flips herself over onto her feet and starts climbing the slope, her hand claws slipping every other step. She’s still making manic gurgling noises. When she reaches the top, she makes a bobbing gesture to the tro-odonts.

They look nervous, back away, but then they bob back. Some parts of carnivore body-language are universal. The bob is understood by most species. It means Let’s play!

Raptor Red’s sister looks down the slope, flexes her knees and ankles, makes a half-turn sideways, blinks twice at Raptor Red, and does a partial somersault.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! Down the slope she goes, spinning slowly like a Utahmptor top. She rams into a ridge of mud, bounces once, and slides into an arroyo, where her body disappears into a four-foot-deep snowdrift.

My sister is playing - playing. It takes a while for Raptor Red to comprehend the scene.

Sister - playful. The concepts don’t go together.

Raptor Red thought she knew all her sister’s moods. But here’s a side of her character that was hidden away, a little secret looniness. It’s something her sister must have learned when she was alone, before her chicks were born.

Her sister’s nose pops up from the snowdrift, followed by her hands and feet. She makes her way awkwardly to where Raptor Red is sitting.

Raptor Red feels her chest being rammed by her sister’s forehead. She isn’t sure what the proper response would be. She feels the two chicks huddling behind her thighs. Clearly they don’t understand their mother right now either.

Her sister picks up the younger chick and swings it over the edge of the slope. Down it goes, followed by its mother. A dozen tro-odonts are sliding down twenty feet away. The air is filled with eeeps! spanning four octaves.

It does look like fun, Raptor Red thinks. The younger chick’s fear gives way to childish pleasure. It scrambles to the top again, jumping up and down impishly. Raptor Red’s sister returns and whacks Raptor Red hard on the rump.

I’ll try it. Raptor Red looks out over the slope, now churned into a low-viscosity mixture of red mud and slush. She grips the edge with her hindclaws, lowers her body, and—

Whump! She’s shoved by her sister and falls on her side. The mud-slush feels smooth as Raptor Red goes downhill. She rolls on her back and is surprised how trees look when seen from this position.

It’s an exhilarating, scary, strange, fast, spinning, upside-down feeling.

She likes it.