Raptor Red

by Robert T. Bakker

  Raptor Red can smell the turtle now - she's eaten rancid turtle meat before, scavenged from carcasses washed up on the shore.

  But this is the first live turtle scent she's experienced. It's a dank, musky, slightly cool, and moist smell. It's exciting, because it's new to her brain.

  The turtle drags her heavy shell up onto the shore with slow, jerky steps. Her long, straight claws dig into the earth.

  Raptor Red can't bear it any longer. She jumps on the turtle, coming down on the shell with both hands. The algae-coated shell slips between her fingers and goes squirting sideways.

  Slapppp, slappp - slapslap. Raptor Red fumbles the slick turtle shell, picks it up, fumbles again.

  Raptor Red sits down and tries to figure the turtle out. She attempts to nibble a hole in the shell, but her teeth slip off the sharp edges of the carapace. Then she picks up the whole shell in her mouth, blinks twice, and bites down really hard.

  Ting! One of Raptor Red's teeth breaks off at the base of the crown. The turtle is unscathed.

  Inside the shell the turtle brain is not panicked. This has happened before. She has been picked up from the water by rambunctious dinosaurs who knock the shell about and gnaw ineffectively and finally give up.

  Raptor Red's teeth, which can cut through a two-ton iguanodon hide, are useless against the five-pound turtle. The turtle shell is triple-layered. The outermost armor is a thin but very tough layer of dead skin with the consistency of very hard fingernail. There are no nerves or blood vessels in the outer layer, no delicate tissue to be hurt. The shell constantly regenerates the fingernail layer from the inside as the outer surface gets worn and scratched. The scratches left by Raptor Red's teeth do no permanent harm.

  The next shell layer is made up of convex plates of bone on the top and flat plates on the bottom. Top and bottom shell bones meet on the left and right side at the bridge, a zone of especially thick, strong bone behind the armpit and in front of the hole for the hindlegs and tail. The smooth contour of the shell bones doesn't give a predator any thin edges to bite off, and the arched cross section makes the shell nearly impossible to crack.

  The innermost armor layer is a brilliant piece of evolutionary engineering and is the main reason that the turtle is safe from Raptor Red's teeth and claws. On the inside surfaces of the bone plates of the upper shell are long, curved girders of bone that reinforce the shell dome and give it exceptional strength and rigidity. These girders are the turtle's ribs. Unlike the ribs of any other backboned creature, turtle rib shafts are fused immovably to the backbone and to the shell plates.

  And the backbone of the torso is fused to the underside of the upper shell too, so the entire torso is tremendously strong.

  When she ate dead turtles, Raptor Red had no problem pulling the meaty hindlegs and tail out of the shell. But now the legs and tail have disappeared from this living specimen and are hidden inside the rib-braced armor. Raptor Red sniffs cautiously at the holes in the shell where the legs have withdrawn. She nudges the shell with her snout and tries to stick her front teeth into the holes. She picks up the turtle carefully in both hands and utters a growl of frustration. The turtle keeps her legs hacked safely inside.

  The Utahraptor is completely foiled by yet another unprecedented and unparalleled triumph of turtle anatomy: the shoulder-swivel. The shoulder blade has a pivot joint with the top shell above and the bottom shell below. To swing the entire front leg into the safety of the bone-armored box, all the turtle has to do is rotate her elbow in toward her neck and - voila! The whole leg disappears within the capacious shell.

  No other creature in the entire Early Cretaceous world has a disappearing shoulder.

  Raptor Red slowly turns the shell around. A quick 'hsssssss' comes from the front end, accompanied by bubbles. Raptor Red can see an eyeball staring back at her. Trinitichelys and all other turtles of the Early Cretaceous Age are primitive in one key area - they cannot retract their head all the way into the shell, the way modern-day turtles can.

  Raptor Red cocks her head and looks very closely at the turtle head. She lifts the thin, outer finger of her left hand and gently probes the shell half covering the turtle head. She tries to dig into the top of the turtle head, but her claw just slips off. The turtle head is armored with thick bone and a fingernail layer. The Law of Darwinian Compensation is operating here. As long as turtles are in a state where they cannot retract their head entirely into the safety of the shell, the turtle skull wears a thick coat of bone armor and hard skin.

  Raptor Red is experiencing the universal frustration of predators who try to crack a turtle. No animal before or since has had such an unbreakable cranial construction.

  Right now the Trinity Turtle is just too much of a puzzle for Raptor Red. She sighs. Plop! She drops the turtle and yawns - she's getting sleepy again. She trudges back to the temporary nest, flops down next to her sister, and closes her eyes.

  Ten minutes later the Trinity Turtle peeks out from under her shell, sniffs, stares, sniffs again, and resumes her waddling march toward a very special piece of sandy shore. Despite being juggled and nibbled by the raptor, her dedication to her reproductive destiny remains unshaken. The sensors in her small olfactory chamber are dialed to one particular scent - the smell of the very same sandbar where she hatched twelve years ago.

  Thirty minutes later her nose tells her brain to stop moving and start digging. Her short, sturdy hindpaws begin to shovel sand with alternating strokes, first left, then right. When the hole is as deep as her shell is tall, she stops and deposits eleven spherical eggs.

  If Raptor Red were still awake and understood the process, she'd feel a pang of jealousy. The turtle's instinct-driven, single-minded reproductive drive is simple compared with the social complexity of Raptor Red's present life. The Trinity Turtle doesn't have to balance the competing demands of sisters and mate. The turtle has no responsibilities other than to her own eggs, and even that duty is fully discharged as soon as she covers the nest with a layer of sand.

  And so on this particular Early Cretaceous night, one turtle mother completes the life cycle of her species and returns to the comfortable monotony of her watery world. One female raptor must go to sleep with the vague hope that the entangling alliances of raptor society will someday give her another chance to reproduce.

  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 fr
om 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.

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nbsp; 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.