RAPTOR RED

WHACKITY-WHACKS JUNE

Whack-whack-clank-crack.

Ouch! the big Acrocanthosaurus thinks as his tooth crown breaks off, leaving the nerve exposed. He drops the little armored dinosaur he was trying to swallow.

Whackity-whackity - WHACK.

Ouch. He reacts again to a sharp pain on his shin where the armored dino’s spikes hit.

WHACK-WHACK-WHACK. The little dino is like a big ultraprickly pinecone, made of bone and muscle, powered by a spastic motor. The acro backs up again, his ankle smarting from a dozen hits from the armored protuberances.

Whump-whack-whump. The baby Gastonia twitches nose to tail again, sending clods of mud over the acro.

No good - not worth the trouble, the acro thinks to himself. He doesn’t like food morsels that make him bleed inside and out. He’s swallowed crocodiles whole before. Their bony ridges were a bit painful as they slid down his gullet. But this little armor-clad demon is much worse.

His broken tooth throbs - it was a fully developed tooth, not ready to be shed. There’s no discomfort when a tooth crown drops out on schedule. The root gets resorbed, the nerve and blood vessel dry up, and the new tooth growing in under the old crown simply pushes the remnant out of the jaw.

But the gaston has whacked the acre’s teeth hard from inside the acro’s mouth as the big predator was about to gulp it down. Several healthy crowns, still connected to nerves, are now cracked.

The acro backs up again. Then he runs forward and tries to kick the gaston. The little dino hunkers down so close to the ground that the acro misses. The acro steps hard on the gaston’s body, flattening it into the mud.

Blurp. The gaston blows watery mud out of his nostrils.

The acro comes to a conclusion: Pinecone dinosaurs - not food.

The acro certainly doesn’t need this nasty tidbit. A hundred tons of carrion piled up along the river sandbars after the flood - thousands of dinosaur bodies, limp and battered, caught in groves of trees and thickets of cycads. It’s a scavenger’s smorgasbord.

After the frustrated meat-eater wanders away, the baby gaston stands up and sniffs the breeze. The gaston’s not real bright compared to a raptor. Like most dino-herbivores, the gaston has only a medium-size brain, about the size of a crocodile of the same body bulk. That’s far less mental mass than a Deinonychus or a Utahraptor has.

And being an herbivore doesn’t supply the mental challenges that an active predator gets every day. A gaston doesn’t have to hunt very far for food - it uses its broad, low muzzle to crop off wide mouth-fuls of conifer seedlings and cycads, food that doesn’t fight back or run away.

The baby gaston knows only a few things, but he knows them very well: Eating the right plants. Avoiding poisonous plants. (He was born with a poison-alarm system, programmed into his olfactory sense.) Avoiding falling off cliffs. (Most land vertebrate species are born with a fear of steep slopes.)

And go whackity-whack when he’s bothered by something.

Since every vulnerable corner of his body is protected by strong bony plates of armor with sharp ridges or spikes sticking out, whackity-whack is a pretty useful response to most threatening situations. The gaston has a short but strong neck, with wide muscles for swinging the armored head side to side. The long torso is so broad and low that predators have a hard time flipping the gaston over on its back. And the long tail has the strongest sideways-flexing muscles, compared to body weight, of any dinosaur.

Whackity-whack has been the simple and successful defensive game plan of the Gastonia species and their ancestors for thirty million years, since the first member of the Ankylosaurian order evolved, far back in the Jurassic Period.

The baby gaston hasn’t a clue how he ended up in the tree. He remembers that he was huddled with his family, facing downwind to keep the rain out of their eyes, on a tall levee - a raised mound of mud that bordered a river. All of a sudden the levee broke. A brutally strong wall of water smashed through the breach, hurling jagged chunks of soil and muck across the floodplain, bowling over the adult gastons and washing away the little ones.

The baby gaston shut his eyes and went whackity-whack at the floodwater. He kept his armored eyelids shut for nearly two days afterward. He remembers being bumped in three dimensions, going up, going down, and then far up; then movement stopped. The sun came out, and he was just beginning to dry out when someone kicked him, and he fell into the water again.

He found himself beached on a low spit of sand. Had he kept his eyes open, he would have seen that he had, in fact, performed a spectacular trick worthy of the finest circus.

He had gotten caught in the branches of a ripped-up cycad tree. Cycad trunks are low-density compared to most other trees, and the cycad with the gaston aboard had bobbed like a balsa raft. It washed downstream for two miles, then jammed itself against a grove of old conifers. A particularly fast burst of floodwater pushed the cycad around and around and finally slid the lightweight cycad wood up the sloping trunks of three partially fallen conifers. The gaston had fallen off the cycad and landed on the lower branches of an old conifer.

Thanks to Raptor Red’s curiosity, the gaston had been pushed out of the tree. But the currents were abating, and he was carried only a short distance before being left aground.

Now that he’s sure the acrocanthosaur is gone, the baby gaston starts pumping his chubby legs as fast as he can - toward the source of a scent that shows where his family is.

Gastons have fared well in the flood. Their wide bodies float right side up even in rough water, unlike the poor iguanodons, who often get tumbled sideways. And the armor plate protected the delicate gastonian viscera from all the collisions with rocks and fallen logs.

The baby gaston sees a high-stepping predator of about three hundred pounds coming right at him. He hunkers down again, waiting. A young male red-snouted Utahraptor is approaching, curious. This carnivore is far more careful than the acro had been. The raptor tentatively reaches out with one forepaw, stretching one finger.

One little tap and - whack-whack.

No - no good to eat, the raptor thinks, but - good to play with.

The male raptor tiptoes around to the other side and reaches out. Tap-tap - whackity-whack!

The male raptor has had a fine day so far - there’s free meat everywhere. No worries about food for the next week or so. He’s the most inquisitive of all the brothers and sisters who hatched out five years ago. He gets away with it because he’s also the quickest. He can jump sideways or backward or straight up and land facing the opposite direction.

He likes to poke strange animals - to see what will happen. Now he creeps around the baby gaston till he’s dead astern. The raptor swings his own tail in anticipation. He notices his own tail movement. An idea!

The raptor turns around and swings his tail at the gaston. Just missed!

He creeps backward a half-step, and swings his tail again. The raptor tail tip barely brushes the end of the gaston’s tail.

Whackity-WHACK. Sand flies sideways as the gas-ton performs a particularly vigorous full-body swoosh.

The male raptor moves to the front, behind a tussock of fern fronds. He crouches. Then he charges, stopping abruptly a yard from the gaston’s head.

No whackity-whack this time.

The raptor sighs. He crouches, then leaps over the gaston.

Still no whackity-whack. The male raptor is getting bored with his toy.

He backs off, takes a running start, and jumps over the gaston while dragging one toe just low enough to touch its back.

Whackity-whack.

A deep coughing roar announces the arrival of seven adult gastons. The baby coughs a reply. The male raptor studies the gastons as they advance. Short legs - very slow is his analysis. He’s learned that the higher the body and the longer the shins and ankles, the faster the dinosaur. He can outrun nearly all his dinosaurian neighbors except for the ostrich dinos, small-headed omnivores with exceedingly elongated lower legs.

He knows he can run rings around the gastons. He trots up to meet them. They stop, lower their heads in a threat, and swing their tails.

Too big whackity-whacks here - dangerous. The raptor’s brain evaluates the one-ton size of the adult gastons. If those adult bodies whack him, it won’t be fun anymore. So if he can’t eat them and can’t play with them, he’ll just go away.

The raptor terminates the game of Taunt the Gaston. He moves up the sand dune and turns west into a wide valley. Here are posted thousands of messages from other dinosaurs. Challenges from young male Utahraptor. Sexual invitations from deinonych widowers who lost their mates in the flood. Panic signals from Astrodon young, separated from their parents and uncles and aunts. Pompous declarations from acros who boast of their indisputable position as Kings of the Cretaceous.

There are even the small-voiced messages from multis, plant-eating furballs who live in colonies: I’ve just dug a new burrow here, and all the shrubs within a ten-yard radius are mine.

The young male Utahraptor’s mind is swamped with all the messages criss-crossing in claim and counterclaim. It’s a cacophony of aromas, like a dozen rap songs sung at once in the language of scent. He tries to read every one. It’s a Cretaceous highway of information, all written in shit.

Dung is the queen of media in the Cretaceous. With his voluminous olfactory chambers, the male Utahraptor can distinguish ten thousand different individuals of his own species from their dung-aroma. He can tell whether a young female is alone and available or firmly bonded in monogamous union. He can tell how long the message has been exposed to the sun and rain.

Appearances may be deceiving, and like all raptors the male insists on a dung-document to prove the identity and status of strangers. It will always be this way with long-snouted predators. His distant cousins, the great tyrannosaurs of the later Cretaceous, will have huge snout chambers for their sense of smell. So will the bears and wolves and hyenas much farther in the geological future. Of all the land animals who hunt big game, only one will come along who cannot read the dung-sign -Homo sapiens.

After reading his way through a half-mile of the shit bulletin board, the male raptor comes to a small, brand-new pile of dung, one clearly deposited after the flood, on a high crest of sand. He sniffs. He stares. He paws at the ground to refresh the scent.

It’s raptor shit. He sniffs again - it’s Utahraptor shit, not the Yellow Snout species but his own red-snouted kind, one who has been eating fresh astro meat with a little iguanodon liver.

Very interesting. He sniffs very slowly, very loudly. There are some undifferentiated signals -raptors whose fecal signature doesn’t say whether they are male or female. And the strongest signal comes from adult females - and he recognizes one particular individual.

Very, very interesting.

It’s very confusing to a young male, but very exciting too. He turns around, three complete circles, sniffing, and delicately overlays the pile with a message of his own.

I was here after you - I - a young, healthy, unattached male.

The male begins to follow the trail of that one particular female.

He searches with his nose, trying to untangle a dozen overlapping raptor scent-trails. He’s after just one particular family group. He finds them a day later.

Raptor Red and her sister are feeling fine. The sun and the limitless banquet of flood-killed corpses everywhere are a predator’s dream come true. The night of terror in the water and up the tree has been pushed back to the far reaches of memory. For Raptor Red the experience will come in handy several times later in her life, but right now the joy of the present occupies all her consciousness.

The only irritation today is the huge flocks of carrion-loving dactyls and birds. Not just-the big aggressive Ornithocheirus but more timid Ornithodesmus too, very agile fliers with short, sharp-edged teeth arranged in a broad semicircle around the front of the beak.

The raptor pack are lying next to a chewed-up Astrodon calf. Raptor Red gets up to shoo away a pair of cheeky Ornithodesmus. They whistle and squawk and jump around. Raptor Red hisses and makes fake attacks. It’s hard to be convincing when her belly is so full and she’s feeling so warm and comfy.

The Ornithodesmus reek of rancid seafood. They’ve been feeding on grounded panzer-fish, trout-size species covered with thick, shiny scales. The sight of so many dinosaur hulks tempted the dactyls to try to steal some meat. These dactyls are smart and flexible - they’ll try a new food source just to see what it’s like.

Why bother - I’m stuffed - don’t care, Raptor Red thinks to herself. Every time she chases the dactyls away from the neck of the astro, they flutter over to the tail. If she were lean, with an empty stomach, she’d be mean and nasty and would try to bite their pretty white heads off.

But Ornithodesmus is too unaggressive to be a danger to the chicks. With a mental shrug that could be translated What the hell, Raptor Red gives up and walks away. The delighted dactyls bounce on top of the astro and yank away at strings of meat hanging from the edges of broken bones. They have little success - they’re not strong enough to rip the tendons and ligaments holding the meat to bone - but they seem to enjoy the novel exercise.