Raptor Red's sister didn't notice that one of the little chicks had wandered away from the pack. When the chick comes squawking back, she gives it a perfunctory greeting that does little to reassure the hungry, frightened youngster.
The young male watches the interaction between mother and chick, and he gets more and more worried. Raptor Red's pack seems to be coming apart: The social bonds are getting weaker, and he's afraid the group will disintegrate if the drought lasts much longer.
The raptor family has camped along one of the few rivers that is still flowing during this severe midsummer dry season. Adult raptors can go without food for a week, but they must have water every day - water to keep their nerves and muscles working, and water to cool their bodies. The small chicks suffer the most. Their fast-growing bodies make enormous demands for food, and they whine and nudge Raptor Red and her sister, begging at the adults' muzzles for food to be regurgitated. But the adults have no food.
Raptor Red looks at the chicks, then at her sister. Without making a sound or a gesture, the two adult females have come to a dreadful agreement: Soon they must abandon the two youngest chicks. Raptor Red's sister has defended her offspring with deadly vigilance for five months, but now she's ready to leave them to die.
It has to be this way. Adult predators must sacrifice their chicks so that the mothers can survive to next season, when they might breed again. The cruel calculus of evolution permits no sentimentality. 'Save the children first!' is a motivation that would kill off the entire genetic line, mother and children both. It would be gene-foolish for Raptor Red's sister to risk her life now - she might have twenty more reproductive seasons, so any one set of chicks is expendable.
All through the ages, most predator young die during the famine season - raptor chicks die in the Early Cretaceous, just as allosaur chicks died in the preceding Jurassic, and just as lion cubs will starve to death, abandoned in the summer on the Serengeti.
The Utahraptor chicks don't realize that this could be their last day. But they do have an instinctive urgency; their genes have turned on their last-ditch defense, a pitiful display of begging designed to appeal to their adult protectors.
Raptor Red's stomach tightens into a knot. She feels very empty and looks away from the chicks. The young male walks slowly over and bumps her snout. She doesn't respond. The famine will drive them apart soon.
When the herbivore herds provide abundant victims, it's best for the pack to stay together, so that two or three raptors can bring down big, dangerous prey. But when big herbivores disappear, the raptors must revert to a more primitive mode of life, searching for biological garbage, the small prey and chewed-up leftovers of the ecosystem. That mode of life is best carried out by single predators operating alone.
Raptor Red has been there before, and so has her male consort. They know their bond is tentative.
They are consorts now, not yet pledged to lifelong partnership. In Raptor Red's mind her loyalties go like this: Give up the chicks first; then if necessary, give up her consort. Only if the famine gets truly terrible will she consider leaving her sister.
In times of famine it's best to sleep during midday, so Raptor Red finds a comfortable spot, partly shaded by a dead cycad tree. The dreamtime offers a refreshing escape from hunger.
Raptor Red jerks her head, suddenly awake. She's been daydreaming about food. She's seen lovely iguanodon haunches, pink and fresh, floating by. Then there were images of plump torsos, neatly stripped of their armored skin, dancing slowly with each other.
She chomps her teeth twice. Now she can feel the meat against her gums. Hmmmm... meat, wonderful meat, soft and warm.
She closes her eyes tight, and a chorus line of trees pull up their roots and saunter around, their trunks metamorphosing into iguanodon drumsticks.
Chmp - chmp - chmp. Her jaws make involuntary chewing motions.
She opens one eye. Great piles of cumulus clouds move slowly. She closes the eye. The clouds turn pale pink, then red, then red-brown. They're airy mounds of liver now, succulent and warm. She squeezes her eyes shut. She feels her body become lighter. She's airlifted upward. She soars among the liver-clouds. She lowers her muzzle and dives into the top of the biggest one.
Chmp - chmp - chmp - chmp. She can feel the soft dino-innards against her gums.
Her empty stomach moans, and something twists inside. The liver-clouds turn pale. Their texture and taste evaporate. Raptor Red's eyes half open. She sees the clear sky. Her conscious brain takes over -insisting that the parade of dino-steaks exists only in that other reality, dreamtime. But she doesn't want to leave the feast, and she tries to re-enter the dream. She closes her eyes, and the liver-clouds reappear, but farther away.
Raptor Red's dream is cut short by a wide object passing over her head. Something was flying just a few yards above, something very large.
The instinctive fear of pterodactyls kicked in the millisecond the wing-wake touched Raptor Red's head. Even with her eyes closed, the slight cooling effect of the disturbed air is enough to trigger the dactyl-fear response. When she was a chick, this instantaneous response saved her life more than once.
She ducks and leans to her left. She sees a grand expanse of white, the underside of a set of wings many yards wide. The winged creature makes no sound whatever. In a few seconds the dactyl is a hundred yards away, spiraling upward on thermal currents generated by the morning sun's heat, recycled into the air through the heat given off by the warmth of the soil.
Raptor Red sits up straight and watches the dactyl. The recognition centers in her brain register the wingtip markings - three green bands. She instantly relaxes a bit. She raises her muzzle and sniffs deeply. A faint olfactory trail lingers in the air. It's a familiar scent. She knows this particular winged beast. He's been her distant companion for as long as she can remember. He's never been a threat to her or her family.
The big dactyl rises rapidly to a thousand feet and pauses. Then he utters a quick burst of chirps. Raptor Red's male consort and her sister are awake now too, staring intently at the acrobatics.
The dactyl zooms down in a dive, crossing over the raptor pack at fifty feet, then climbing another hundred to zip over the treeline to the south.
The raptor sisters raise their bodies up, extending knees and ankles and lean forward in anticipation. They know what to expect. The young male follows their lead.
The dactyl disappears behind the trees. Raptor Red blinks and stares and blinks.
Without a sound the white wings with green bars reappear in a near-vertical climb, five hundred yards away. Six raptor eyes are fixed on the movement.
Raptor Red knows this aerial display might mean fresh food soon. Real food - not dreamtime drumsticks.
She remembers well how she met the white dactyl, years ago. It was when she was taken out on her first hunt. The Utahraptor family had gathered around an armor-plated dinosaur, one of three whose drowned bodies the adult raptors had found on a riverbank. Raptor Red and her sisters had been led by their mother to the one-ton carcasses, fragrant with sundried blood and fresh viscera spilled on the pale yellow sand.
Her mother had prepared the chicks' meal. Great gashes were ripped into the torsos of the prey, gashes big enough for Raptor Red to stick her head in up to her shoulders. It was an exciting, adult experience. Up till then, Raptor Red and her sister had fed on regurgitated meat slabs, brought back to the nest in the throat pouches of their mother or father.
Raptor Red's eyes had widened when she saw where the meat slabs came from. She was vibrating with excitement when she got to rip her own meat portions from the still-warm carcass. Then the dactyls came. They swooped low, and her parents snarled. For the rest of the day, she watched her mother and father chase off the dactyl scavengers. But they never left - the vulturine pterodactyls had hung around, clattering their yard-long jaws in exasperation.
On the third day the raptor family had eaten their fill. The adults didn't care about the airborne scavengers anymo
re. A flock of black-winged dactyls, Ornithodesmus, swarmed over the carcasses and began to tear off meat strips - when a tremendous white object flew at great speed into the mass of wings and bodies. Black-winged dactyls scattered like feathers from an exploded seabird.
Raptor Red was fascinated by that white dactyl. It inspired fear in all other flying creatures, but it never tried to attack the raptor chicks or come close to the adults. Time and time again she would see the same white flying giant appear at kill sites after the raptors had satisfied their appetites. Again and again Raptor Red and her sisters watched the lone white giant disperse all the other scavengers.
Raptor Red gradually accepted the white dactyl as a benign element in her world, an elegant aerial camp-follower who never pushed his participation in the feast.
Raptor Red's parents didn't worry about their chicks when the white dactyl was around. He functioned like an aloof baby-sitter or sheep dog. He kept the other flying predators away, and often chased the smaller land predators too. Raptor Red learned that raptors could, on occasion, profit from watching the white dactyl. When the great white beast flew in ostentatious circles a quarter-mile away, the raptor pack would investigate. Often they'd find a big dead dinosaur half-hidden in the undergrowth. The raptors would feed. The dactyl, whose snout was too weak to break through the skin of an intact carcass, would wait patiently until he was allowed to glean scraps from the dissected body.
On this day in the middle of the August drought, the appearance of the white dactyl is most welcome. The Utahraptor sisters get up and lead the chicks at a trot toward the sand flat beyond the treeline. Raptor Red's male consort sits in confusion. He's uneasy with all dactyls - but he decides to trust Raptor Red's judgment and rushes to catch up.
The white dactyl is very fond of the giant raptors in Raptor Red's family. They seem to have a more immediate effect on their surroundings than any other species. And they respect his position as Dactyl Emeritus of the ecosystem, a position that entitles him to scraps from every kill the big raptors make. He's spotted a mummified Astrodon body, and he wants his raptor friends to help share this multi-ton hoard of meat and entrails. He can't break through the mummified hide himself, but he knows that Raptor Red and her sister can.
The white dactyl definitely does not like Utah-raptors' smaller relative, the deinonychs. Those raptors travel in large unruly packs, and they're rude to dactyls. They've tried to ambush him when he's fed from their kills. So he buzzes them when they least expect it.
He never leads deinonychs to carcasses, the way he's doing now for Raptor Red's pack.
The raptor sisters break through the dense thicket of saplings and rush out over the hot sand. They pause, sniffing the stale air.
There it is! their olfactory systems scream inside their brains. They run to the spot where a huge carcass lies buried under sand and driftwood.
Utahmptor claws pull through the suntanned hide.
Ribs are broken by raptor hindlegs pulling on claws hooked through the astro's chest.
Raptor Red and her sister push their scale-covered snouts through the gaps ripped into the body cavity - and find gastronomical heaven. Hunks of liver and lung, nicely seasoned by early decomposition, slide down the sisters' throats. It's a splendid feeling.
Raptor Red's mood changes as her digestive enzymes turn on all through her stomach and intestines. The imminent prospect of loneliness evaporates. She grabs a big piece of astro innards and bounds over to the young male, bobbing her head.
For me? he asks with a submissive lowering of his head.
YES! Raptor Red answers by shoving the food right up to his upper lip.
The big dactyl waits till the adult Utahraptors are finished, then pokes his long snout deep into the carcass and gleans select morsels.
The chicks tiptoe up to the carcass, still afraid of the dactyl. They nip at shreds of meat hanging from leg joints. Soon the sensation of filled bellies makes them bolder. One of the young chicks makes mock-charges at the big old dactyl, who's perched on a low branch. Holding its head low and growling in a falsetto voice, the chick runs forward, then jams its toes into the sand, screeching to a stop with its head raised and mouth open.
The old-timer in the tree doesn't move. He lets the chick get closer and closer. Each mock-attack makes the chick braver - and more self-deluded. At its sixth charge the Utahraptor-ette stomps its feet directly below the branch where the dactyl sits like a statue.
There's no sound, no movement from the big flier. His wings remain tightly folded against his body, making his body mass appear small.
The chick is puzzled. It rises as high as it can go, sniffing loudly. Its snout tip touches the branch where the dactyl sits. It moves the snout to the underside of the dactyl toes. The chick nudges the dactyl's feet.
The white wings snap open in one quick movement. The great wing-finger, equivalent to our human ring finger, sweeps upward at the wrist, unfurling the immense white wing surface. In an instant the dactyl's size seems to increase a hundredfold.
The chick is enveloped by the dactyl's shadow.
Clunk!
The chick tries to accelerate backward but falls over instead. It flails its arms and legs, trying to get up, turn around, and run away all at once.
The dactyl stands, wings outstretched, motionless.
The chick tumbles over itself and rolls up to Raptor Red. It gets up, mouth wide open in horror, and leans hard against Raptor Red's side. She glances sideways at the chick and gives it a rude shove.
The chick hurls itself toward its mother, squealing.
Raptor Red's sister looks over at her chick, at the dactyl, then back at the chick, then resumes chewing on some gray-brown meat from the inner thigh of the dinosaur carcass.
BUBBLES
AUGUST
The white dactyl decides he'll make some bubbles.
He's watched the raptor pack for half a day. He's eaten as much as he can without hindering his ability to take off from the ground. Now he's bored again.
The breeze is blowing hard over the sand flat. The white dactyl hops off the tree and feels the hot sand under his hands and feet. He walks batwise, with knees turned outward and his elbows strongly bent. He looks awkward and uncomfortable, but the ultra-strong chest muscles that power his flight give his arms the strength to hop quickly over the ground.
The white dactyl is a very cautious walker. He will go for a stroll only when there's a strong, constant breeze, enough wind energy to lift his body if he unfurls his wings. He never walks far in still air. That would be suicidal - too many land predators would be tempted to run him down.
His three walking foreclaws dig into the sand at each step, cutting deep incisions each time. Right next to each clawprint comes the narrow hindpaw, with its four small, straight claws.
The trackway he leaves behind on the sand flat looks wide and inelegant compared with Raptor Red's footprints. The white dactyl is a distant cousin of the raptor's - both could trace their ancestry to fast-stepping land predators. But dactyl limbs have become ill-suited to land locomotion. The three sharp, narrow, hooklike foreclaws on each hand are perfect for hanging on to trees and cliffs but inefficient for walking. The dactyl chest muscles are gigantic flight engines that power the wings but cannot give a fast terrestrial gait.
The dactyl's strongest extremity is his fourth finger, increased in length and bulk a thousandfold over the usual dinosaurian condition. This is the flight finger, thicker and stronger than the dactyl's thigh, the flexible strut that holds up the entire wing leading edge.
The white dactyl does have a sense of how different he is from all his distant dinosaurian kin. He puts all life into two categories: can-fly; can't-fly. He knows that if it's clever, any can-fly can avoid injury and death from can't-flys.
FWP! He jumps across a narrow stream bed onto a tall river-channel sandbar. He swivels his thin, flexible neck around to check out the raptor pack. Three chicks are asleep in the warm afternoon sun. Three adults are
nearly motionless too. No sign of nervousness.
The low-angle sun highlights the long line of dactyl footprints leading from the kill site to the river. The white dactyl cocks his head and stares. He's used to seeing dinosaur footprints from the air, laid out map-fashion. He can identify a dozen dino-species from two hundred feet up from their characteristic stride pattern and foot geometry. But he hasn't seen his own tracks so clearly marked before. He knows how to identify dactyl tracks from the air - by their widely spaced imprints and the unusual three-fingered hands - and he enjoys a moment of self-realization as he surveys the record of his own footsteps.
It's interesting, and the sight relieves his boredom for a moment.
He finds a spot where the wind is screened by a high sand-dune crest. He peers into a pool of murky water. There's a brownish object wriggling in slow motion in the bottom muck.
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