RAPTOR RED

FLOOD AND PANZERS! EARLY JUNE

Raptor Red wakes up in the middle of the night. She often does - predators are light sleepers. Her pack-mates are sleeping on an abandoned croc-nest, heaped high with dried vegetation cemented with mud. It’s a comfortable lair, dry, with a view over the valley so the adults can keep track of the herbivore herds and the comings and goings of Yellow Snouts and giant acro predators.

The pack used the croc-nest as a base for a month after they were forced to leave Tick-Bird Meadow when the Acrocanthosaurus took control of the astrodon carcass.

Raptor Red stares to the west. A mixed herd of iguanodons and astros is making a terrific racket, bellowing, snorting, screaming. Iguanodons often join their social units to a pod of astros. Iguanodons have excellent eyesight, but their short necks and low shoulders make it hard for them to survey their surroundings and detect predators at a distance. Astros can see for miles when they raise their long necks twenty-five feet above ground level.

The astro sentries have been making it hard for the raptor pack to sneak up on the iguanodons in the last few days. And the huge, nervous masses of iguanodons, ready to charge or stampede at the slightest provocation, have been making it hard for the raptors to isolate single astros.

Raptor Red and her sister have still managed to keep the chicks fed. But it’s been hard work. Back at Tick-Bird Meadow, nearly every one of their attacks had ended with a kill. Now only one out of five attacks succeeds. And there’ve been two close calls. Raptor Red’s sister was cornered by thirty or forty angry cow iguanodons, advancing shoulder to shoulder. The iguanodons, their courage multiplied by their numbers, made a group decision to switch from flight to murderous defense. The sight of one of their sisters lying dead, ripped open by raptor claws, pushed their iguanodon minds to a fury of revenge.

Then Raptor Red’s sister made a serious mis-judgment: She screamed at the cow herd and stood her ground next to the kill. Raptor Red had already retreated. She is the more cautious of the pair, the one who always evaluates and reevaluates the balance of risk and reward. But her sister can be like a whirling dervish, convinced of her indestructibility, lashing her claws, snapping her teeth, attacking when she should withdraw.

This time her frenzied belligerence almost made her chicks orphans. The iguanodon herd split up and made two wide crescents that almost surrounded the raptor mother. She backed up into a gulley, but the upstream end of the gulley was steep and slippery.

Thirty iguanodon cows started advancing up the gulley, swinging their deadly thumb-spikes. Another fifty or sixty were closing in from the left and right.

Raptor Red saw that in a second or two her sister would be flattened by a hundred angry hindpaws and jabbed by the spikes on a hundred iguanodon hands.

Raptor Red made a loud mock-attack from behind. For a moment the iguanodons' unified spirit was distracted. Those nearest the raptor mother stopped and looked around. Raptor Red’s sister scrambled up the gulley wall and escaped by climbing into the thick branches of a conifer tree.

That was yesterday morning. In the afternoon the raptor sisters found a cow who had been crippled in a fall and was abandoned by the rest of the herd. Easy kill.

Now Raptor Red monitors the movement of the herbivore herd in the night. The moon is nearly full and casts a cold, ivory light on the scene. Now and then the cool light plays across a hundred iguanodon backs.

Flickers of angry orange light appear on the western horizon far away. Cobalt-blue clouds are illuminated from underneath. A dull rumble reaches Raptor Red’s ears.

Suddenly, the western sky is brightly illuminated by a jagged white streak. Raptor Red tenses herself, knowing that a loud noise will come in five seconds or so.

Crackkk! Raptor Red shudders involuntarily at the noise.

The iguanodon-astro herd is coming close, passing a quarter-mile to the north. That’s alarming. The herd is downwind - they should be able to smell the raptor lair. Raptor Red worries that the cows are coming to avenge the death of their colleague. But that’s never happened before. Iguanodons don’t hold grudges for long. When raptors make a kill, either the cows attack immediately, or they go away and seem to forget all about their recently deceased kin.

Raptor Red gets ready for action, for quick evacuation of her kin group. But the noisy herbivores just keep going eastward, paying not the slightest attention.

Raptor Red stares up at the moon. Then she stares down at the moon. The moon’s reflection on the ground is almost as bright as the moon itself. But the ground reflection shimmers and quakes, and ripples seem to pass through it.

Raptor Red becomes alert. This isn’t right. The moon shouldn’t reflect off dry mud. It reflects that way only in water.

Then she feels a cold current on her toes! She jerks herself up. The rippled moon reflection is rising up to the level of the croc-nest. Pieces of foliage float by, fast.

She backs up to the top of the mound, bumping into her sister, who jumps up and falls over her chicks, who squeak in alarm, scurry over themselves, and promptly roll off the mound and right into the water. Plop, plop, plop!

Raptor Red would laugh if evolution had given her a way to generate that sound. The chicks were particularly naughty yesterday, getting in the way of the adults in a very serious situation. Raptor Red wanted to swat them hard.

Her sister gets very excited and jumps in after the chicks, deluging them in splashes as she hops from one foot to another. Raptor Red calmly wades in, making hardly a ripple. Her sister is the better swimmer, but Raptor Red is better at wading and feeling her way through water in the dark.

A chick clambers up Raptor Red’s thigh and hangs on to her neck like a jockey. Another chick climbs the base of her tail and crawls, inchworm style, up to the first chick.

Raptor Red now has trouble balancing. The two chicks insist on shifting their weight first to one side, then the other. She sees the third chick, upside down, caught in a waterlogged cycad frond.

Raptor Red picks the chick up in her mouth.

Meanwhile, her sister is in panic mode, beating the water with her hands, trying to gather her chicks. She always was the high-strung one in her brood, given to fits of hysterical activity. Yet she raised three chicks to adult size last year and is doing quite well this year.

A huge turtle, a yard across, floats by.

Raptor Red is now worried. The water is coming faster and getting higher and she can’t go back to the summit of the croc-nest - it’ll be submerged in a few minutes. She has never experienced a life-or-death test in water. She doesn’t know what to do. She has no learned experience to help.

If she were able to fly up and over the storm flood and view the hills miles to the west, the way a white-winged dactyl is now doing, she would have been even more afraid. The dactyl has seen rain falling in the foothills for an entire day. He has seen rain clouds, heavy and gray, sitting on the western mountains for five days. The white dactyl has seen all this before, on three occasions during his long life. He’s aloft in the darkness now because he knows the floods are coming.

From three hundred feet above, he sees streams swollen beyond capacity. A billion tons of unrestrained water are escaping the confines of riverbanks.

Trees are being knocked down like twigs. Mud and sand, in volumes measured in cubic kilometers, are choking the waters.

Raptor Red’s family is experiencing a geological catastrophe, a disaster, a thousand-year flood.

When the climate cycle reaches a certain point of coincidence, when moist air from the Pacific mixes with moist air from the southern seas, and when temperatures are just right over the Nevada mountains, the thousand-year rains come. And Utah is flooded with muddy waters ten, twenty, and thirty feet thick. Mud blankets yards deep are left everywhere, burying living and dead dinosaurs. Crocodiles, fish, turtles, and tiny fur-bearing mammals too, are caught up in the mud torrents.

It’s a bigger flood than even the long-lived dactyl has seen. Floods of this magnitude occur so infrequently that there’s no memory stored in the raptor genetic code. Once a thousand years is simply too rare an event. Raptor Red has an instinctive inventory of responses to the usual types of storms, to the cloudbursts her species experiences every year. But she cannot be prepared for this night.

Many raptors will die. Hundreds of iguanodons will drown, their bloated carcasses washing downstream and going aground on sandbars in Colorado. Mother Crocodile will survive, carried far to the east by the flood. After the flood is over, she will re-immigrate, swimming slowly back upstream. She will build another nest close to where her old one was buried in mud.

Raptor Red would die if she were alone. She cannot come up with a tactic of survival by herself. But her sister can.

Raptor Red’s sister has different behavioral genes - all dinosaur siblings differ a little bit this way, except for rare identical twins. Raptor Red’s sister is too high-strung, too quick to violence, too eager to attack in the face of hopeless odds, too slow to recognize when she should move her brood away from danger. Raptor Red is smarter, calmer, and a much better tactician in the hunt.

But Raptor Red doesn’t know how to swim in a strong current or how to climb trees in pitch-darkness. Her sister does.

Raptor Red deliberately follows her sister now, walking through the dark water. The enormous load of sand and silt carried by the flood increases the kinetic energy of the current. It’s like walking through liquid cement being shot out at high velocity.

Raptor Red slips and falls halfway, her left knee going down into the moving muck. The chicks scream. Her sister comes back and leans against Raptor Red. Two chicks jump ship, transferring to their mother’s body. Raptor Red gets up.

Her sister leads them deeper into the water. Raptor Red feels her feet losing contact with the ground. She thrashes her tail, trying to swim back to higher ground. But her sister keeps swimming with the current, not trying to fight her way across the trajectories of maximum hydraulic energy.

Raptor Red starts to swim too. She would swim slowly in calm water, but now, swimming parallel to the current, her velocity is added to the flood-water’s. Trees zip by. A bull astro, looking dull and confused, stands like a stone bridge in the current, the flood splashing high on the upstream side of his legs. He’ll live through the night by simple virtue of his forty-thousand-pound inertia.

Raptor Red has not been dependent upon another member of her species since she was a nest-bound chick, unable to go out on her own. On this terrible night she decides to follow her sister, even though it makes no sense. Raptor Red is impressed by her sister’s steady, unruffled response - either she is mad or she knows how to escape.

The two raptor sisters swim for three hours. It’s actually not difficult. They keep just enough speed beyond the current to navigate easily. Other raptors will exhaust themselves fighting the current. They’ll give up and float helplessly. And they’ll be drowned when they get entangled in fallen foliage or swept up in whirlpools.

A tall, dark massive grove of centuries-old conifer trees looms up on the right. Raptor Red’s sister turns toward them. Raptor Red follows close behind.

They bump into the fallen trunks of smaller trees, and Raptor Red feels her knees get bruised and bumped and bruised again. She grabs at a low-hanging branch, digging her foreclaws deep into the bark. This brings relief - the current is gentle. Raptor Red could hang on for hours.

But her sister goes on, swimming in between the biggest, oldest trunks. Reluctantly, Raptor Red lets go and follows. In a few minutes that branch will be under water.

At last her sister stops at the base of a huge tree. Its trunk slants at a forty-degree angle; its top is jammed into the crowns of six other big trees. It has half fallen down, but it doesn’t look like it will fall further that night.

Raptor Red’s sister reaches up with both hands, grabbing the bark. Then she flexes her hips down with a quick, powerful jerk. Her two hindlegs grab the trunk underwater. She moves her right leg up and grabs the bark opposite her right hand. Then she repeats the operation with the left hindleg. Then she shifts her right hand up - then the right hindleg.

Slowly, very deliberately, with great strength and slow coordination, she climbs the sloping trunk. Ten feet, twenty feet. She stops when she reaches the crown, where a maze of branches extend at right angles to the trunk. There are already some flood refugees wedged up there. A half-grown Yellow Snout raptor glares balefully at her. Raptor Red’s sister extends her head, opens her mouth, and utters a very low snarl.

The Yellow Snout falls backward but catches himself in the crown of another tree.

Raptor Red has watched her sister’s climb in amazement. She had no idea that Utahraptor bodies were capable of climbing. Last year she chased some

Deinonycus, the smaller raptor species, up trees and saw them ascend beyond her reach. She hadn’t attempted to follow.

Raptor Red is not too proud to learn by example. If her sister can climb that high with chicks hanging on, so can she.

Raptor Red grabs the bark with her foreclaws. The bark is surprisingly hard, and her claws slip off. She grabs again, piercing the bark with the sharp claw tips. She uses her instinctive style of claw-work, the style she uses when she attacks a thick-hided astro. Her finger-tendons flex at maximum power. The claw tips dig deeper. They hold.

She places the sole of her right hindfoot against the tree trunk, flexing her rear toe so the claw grabs into the bark. Her killing claw too now becomes a strong climbing apparatus. Digging the killing claw into the tree is a lot like slashing through the skin of a big iguanodon - except in climbing the motion is much slower and more carefully controlled.

Instinct and intelligence work together to make Raptor Red a tree-climber. Climbing is not really new for her. She’s climbed up the hulking carcasses of astros on several occasions. She’s climbed up the backs and necks of live cow iguanodons a dozen times. Climbing this tree really isn’t more difficult. The tree doesn’t try to shake her off, the way a struggling prey-victim might.

Raptor Red thinks through every step. She modifies her instinctive attack movements so that they keep her securely on the tree, going upward. Utah-raptors are too big to be regular climbers. Nature imposes strict rules of engineering. The bigger the animal, the tougher it is to move vertically.

A Utahraptor, weighing five hundred pounds as an adult, isn’t born with the confidence to climb. But it can be learned. Raptor Red is learning this night.

Raptor Red reaches her sister. The raptor pack huddles closely, hanging on to each other and to the branches. When their claws cut the young branches, their nostrils sting with the smell of poisonous sap. Raptor Red feels the tree swaying and shuddering as fallen logs wash against the base of the trunk. The water is still rising. The moon is blocked by heavy clouds, and the rains have spread from the western hills to directly overhead.

Raptor Red is cold.

The sun finally breaks through after thirty-six hours of rain. The Yellow Snout raptor’s grip was loosened by the chilling breeze. He fell and was drowned. Raptor Red heard other creatures - she couldn’t identify the species - fall too. Most were small. Some were pushed off their branches by newcomers who were stronger and meaner. Two or three were large and made loud splashes when they hit the water. There were screams and hisses too, marking fights for the safest perches.

Raptor Red and her sister move their bodies to get the benefit of the sun’s warmth. The chicks are fine - all through the day and a half of rain, they kept themselves stuck under the adults. The soft, thin belly skin of Raptor Red and her sister kept the chicks warm.

The tree crown comes alive with animals stretching their joints. Fingers and toes that had been tightly clenched for so many hours are painfully, slowly extended and flexed and extended. Species who are mortal enemies on the ground are side by side now. But the predators are too chilled, too shaken to resume killing.

Raptor Red sees something moving below that appears to be half-turtle, half-crocodile, half-iguanodon. She’s never seen anything like it. It’s about forty pounds, its back covered with armor plate, its sides studded with bony spikes. Its long tail ends in a small club of bone. Even its upper eyelids are armored.

Raptor Red reaches down to sniff - her curiosity makes her forget the rainy ordeal.

She can just touch the strange armored animal with her left foot. She extends her toes and gives it a shove.

Wham-thwack-thwack-thwacky-thwack!

She pulls her foot up just before the beast flails its spike-edged tail convulsively. Branches break, and the armored beast falls ten feet onto a soft, soggy mound of conifer needles.

Whacky-thwack! Another convulsion. The beast falls again, onto a tangle of flotsam and jetsam.

It’s a baby Gastonia, an armored dinosaur. Raptor Red has never seen one before.

The sun gets very hot. Raptor Red can see dry ground not far away - it will be an easy swim once she has warmed up a bit.

Other dinosaurs are sunning themselves too, in preparation for their descent. In a few hours the flood-truce will be over. Predators and herbivores who now share branches in peace will be back down on the ground, trying to kill and avoid being killed.

Raptor Red looks around at the many pairs of eyes staring out from the conifer crown. One pair of eyes is staring right back. It bobs up and down. Raptor Red can see a long snout in front of the eyes, and on the snout is a bright crimson streak.

It’s the male who tried to court her near Tick-Bird Meadow. Now he goes into a modified courtship dance, hanging on to the tree with his hindfeet, moving his shoulders and neck gracefully.