His beak stabs down, and he swallows a juvenile lungfish, a foot and a half long.
But he's not really here to fish.
Zip-bib-bib-bib.
Big brown bubbles rise lazily to the surface as he exhales with his entire face under water.
Pip-pip-pip-
The bubbles pop as he neatly pricks each one in turn with his beak tip.
He invented this game a month ago, when he accidently coughed underwater while trying to catch a turtle. He was intrigued by the big bubbles that hung around the water surface. And since his basic approach to Nature is 'When in doubt, poke it!' he had the exhilarating experience of exploding bubbles bursting around his snout.
Bib - bib - grrg. An especially corpulent bubble, the largest he has blown, rises and sits like a crystalline dome, motionless on the surface.
He looks with admiration at his handiwork. A water-strider bug zigzags crazily around the bubble, bumping into it repeatedly. A dry fern fragment drifts in on the wind and falls down onto the bubble's roof, sticking there. Now a flotilla of smaller bubbles join their flagship, some adhering to the big bubble, some merging with it.
The white dactyl is startled to see the sky reflected in a spherical distortion, the bubble acting like a fish-eye lens. He cocks his head and stares very closely.
He sees clouds in the bubble, and a dactyl flock very far away - and a raptor face very close.
His whole body galvanizes into an emergency take-off. His left wingtip hits water. His feet spread sand everywhere. With panicked clumsiness he ascends the sandbar and catches the breeze. He's aloft and downwind in a few seconds.
Raptor Red doesn't even look at the dactyl disappearing along the riverbank. She's absorbed with the thousands of bubbles, large and small, left by his sudden take-off.
Exploration is mental play, and big-brained carnivores are the most playful in any ecosystem. Raptor Red was enjoying the sense of well-fed well-being on the sand flat when she saw the dactyl doing something strange out on the river. She has no fear of this dactyl - and no desire to eat it either. So curiosity took over.
She's been watching the bubble game for several minutes. She shares with the dactyl a predator's love of slap-and-grab games. Anything that small and that moves suddenly is a target for grabbing. When she was a chick, she learned snout-eye coordination by slapping at leaves that danced across the ground in the wind. As a young adult she sharpened her reflexes by trying two-handed grabs at the multis, the plump furballs who live in colonial burrows like Cretaceous prairie dogs.
She's never tried to slap a bubble.
She sticks her muzzle into the water and pulls it out. Too slow. The bubbles are tiny and unsatisfying.
SPLSH! She whacks her muzzle into the pool. Too fast. Ripples everywhere, and foam, but no big fat bubbles.
She sputters and coughs. She can't figure it out. She's bothered - most of her life she's been able to learn new predator tricks by mimicry. She's watched her parents, her sisters, even raptors of other species.
This time she gives up. The capacity to learn is a combination of inborn intelligence and long experience. The white dactyl is too clever and too long-lived and too wise. Raptor Red will never know all that he knows. She looks up, scanning the sky. The white dactyl is already far away.
And he is in a foul mood. He dislikes being forced to take off suddenly. He dislikes having a dinosaur creep up close behind him - even a dinosaur he considers friendly. He dislikes not being in complete control.
He ascends to a thousand feet, making grumbly noises to himself. He checks out the Utahraptor sisters and their chicks. He sees a Deinonychus pack, a big one. Twenty of the medium-size raptors are camped downwind ten miles from Raptor Red.
The white dactyl knows what will make his bad mood disappear. He rises slowly upwind and makes a wide turn to get the sun directly behind him. Then he closes his wings and dives.
He builds up speed fast. He adjusts his dive angle with slight movements of the membrane between thigh and tail. At 200 feet he opens his wings and flattens the dive.
He comes over the treeline at 150 miles per hour in nearly level flight. The deinonychs have no warning. The alpha male is standing up, scratching himself behind the ear, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his back.
FWOOOOOOOOP!
The deinonych ducks at the last millisecond and loses his balance, falling into a group of subadult males, who scatter. The white dactyl scores with his beak tip, leaving a small but painful wound on the alpha male's hip.
As he ascends again in the afternoon air, the white dactyl can see the entire Deinonychus pack milling around in great agitation.
The old pterodactyl feels much better now.
ALWAYS GO FOR THE ONE THAT LIMPS
SEPTEMBER
Too fast, too fast, too fast... Raptor Red is hidden in a brown tangle of ferns, dead still. Only her bright eye betrays her presence, watching a flock of ostrich dinos run by.
Much too fast. She blinks, a long deliberate blink she uses to clean dust off her eyeball, the sort of blink an eagle will use while it waits for the ideal moment to dive down on an antelope calf. Her nictitating membrane, a clear, moist sheet of tissue that travels sideways across her eye, passes over her eyeball like a high-tech wind-shield washer.
Raptor Red knows she must operate at peak performance in all senses, all locomotor organs, all powers of reason. She and her sister and the young male face a tough challenge today: feeding themselves and satisfying the voracious appetites of three fast-growing chicks, all on a diet of ostrich dinosaurs, the smartest, fastest, most difficult prey a raptor dares to attack.
But Raptor Red has great confidence in the efficiency of her newly enlarged pack. The addition of the young male has doubled the kill ratio. The oldest chick helps too when she can. When operating as a foursome, the Utahraptor pack succeeds in half of their attacks.
Too fast - too fast. Raptor Red watches the ostrich dinos prance by. She can see the young male raptor at work. He is spooking the flock, moving around the far side, exposing his head and shoulders for a few seconds so the ostrich dinos will get agitated and move over toward the spot where Raptor Red and her sister are hiding.
Much too fast. A big ostrich dino hen, three hundred pounds at least, shifts into passing gear. Her body floats in the air. Her unbelievably long shins and ankles strike down and backward in short strokes, throwing up a yellow puff of dust each time the compact toenails dig into the dried turf.
She's going more than fifty miles per hour -effortlessly. No dinosaur in the Early Cretaceous is faster. Her intelligent eyes do quick surveys right and left and behind her, her graceful swanlike neck turning constantly. This hen too is confident - confident in her powers of escape, in her supreme velocity that guarantees no dinosaur can catch her once she has reached her full speed.
The hen's sense of invulnerability comes not just from the feeling of raw power in her leg muscles. She's clever and a quick learner. She's seven years old, a mother twice, a survivor of twenty-five previous ambushes by raptors and six by the hulking acrocanthosaurs.
The hen is almost smug. She knows that there are raptors to the left and raptors to the right, and she knows that she has enough of a head start. The only thing that could bring her down right now would be if she put her foot into a burrow made by the furballs, who live in immense underground colonies. At this speed jamming a foot in a burrow would break her ankle, and she'd be dead in a few seconds.
The hen doesn't worry about the burrows. They're there. But at such a high speed she can't see them. She doesn't worry about things beyond her control.
The hen's left foot just barely touches the outer rim of a multi burrow. Inside, the family of furry mammals huddle together, wincing at the thunder of feet above. The hen stumbles once.
Raptor Red sees the misstep. She cocks her head in that direction. But the ostrich dino hen recovers without losing much speed. In three more strides she's back at maximum velocity.
&nbs
p; Raptor Red moves her head quickly, in jerks, trying to take in all the action. The ostrich dino flock is breaking up, fragmenting into six or seven units. A light-brown blur passes - three ostrich dino chicks, half grown, almost as fast as their mother.
Even the chicks - too fast. Raptor Red's automatic prey evaluation computer cranks out the discouraging results.
THERE! Raptor Red's eyes lock onto a male ostrich dino, far behind the mother-chick subgroup. Her visual mode changes immediately from wide-scan search to monofocus. Her keen sight has picked out that male - he's limping.
Her sister has locked on the same male. Their predator visual system is superb at picking up the slightest irregularity in the rhythm of running. The slight asymmetry of right-left leg strokes. The almost imperceptible clumsiness on one foot that shows a joint injured or diseased.
Raptor Red starts running, hunched down. She can see her sister running low down ahead. The entire ostrich dino flock veers away and picks up speed. All the ostrich dinos are pulling away from the raptor sisters.
All except one.
The raptor male leaps over the bushes, lands in a full crouch, and takes off. For a few seconds he gains on a group of hens in the middle of the flock. His short, bulgy calf muscles give him quicker acceleration than the ostrich dinos. He gets within ten feet of a young hen. But she's reaching her maximum speed now and pulls away from him.
The whole flock turns away and crosses obliquely in front of the raptor sisters.
Raptor Red's ears are full of a hundred thud-thuds a second, the rapid-fire beating of ostrich dino hind-paws on the earth. The dust cloud now grows to fifty feet high. Raptor Red can't see them clearly anymore, even though they are very close. Individual ostrich dinos appear as dark or light phantasms - sometimes one catches the light filtering through the dust, sometimes another is in deep shadow.
Whooooph. A big hen cuts right in front of Raptor Red's nose. She pays no attention.
Whoooph-whoooph. Two ostrich dino chicks zip by, right astern. Raptor Red feels their wake in the air behind her. But she keeps running ahead.
A big shadowy mass just misses her and flies a foot over her shoulders. It's an ostrich dino cock, leaping in terror.
For a second Raptor Red sees her sister and the older raptor chick in the dust, coming the opposite way. Raptor Red stands upright, still running. A long-neck with a nearly toothless head emerges from the dust, then disappears. Raptor Red can see a pair of slender arms with three straight claws, poking wildly.
She ducks down and just avoids being stung by the ostrich dino hands. Raptor Red catches a glimpse of the huge eyes of the ostrich dino, turning in every direction, looking for escape. The head vanishes again into the dust.
KLUMP! Something falls, hard, a few feet away.
Raptor Red slows, stops.
There is her sister, sitting on top of the male ostrich dino who was limping. He's already dead, his chest cut open by slashes of her left hindclaw.
The male raptor comes up, panting. He's run harder and longer than the rest of the pack. And it's very hot now. The dust has plugged up one nostril, and he sits down to clean the dirt out with his hindfoot.
Raptor Red's sister glares at him. He tries to pretend he doesn't see. She begins to huff and puff and pull the carcass away, toward the treeline where the two smaller chicks are waiting. They were with their mother at the beginning of the hunt an hour ago, but the heat got to be too much for them. Their mother and aunt let them get away with this lazy behavior for now.
As the two little chicks play with the long ankle bones of the ostrich dino - all that remains of the beast after an hour of chewing and scratching - the young male inches closer and closer to one of the youngsters. Raptor Red is watching.
The young male is only a foot away from the chick's tail tip. Raptor Red stares at the young male's lips. She won't be alarmed until she sees the upper lip curled back, uncovering the glistening ivory of the teeth.
'SQWAKKKKKKKKKK!' Raptor Red's sister comes flying through the group. Chicks scatter to both sides, like a six-seven-ten split being converted by a pro bowler. The young male rolls completely over into the defensive-submissive posture: both pairs of clawed feet, two aft, two forward, protecting his vulnerable belly, his back slightly arched against the ground.
'SsssssssHSSSSS.' Raptor Red's sister gets between the chicks and the male. She paws the air with strokes of her left hind killing claw. She's serious -and he knows it. She's ninety-nine percent of the way to a kill-or-be-killed confrontation.
Raptor Red pretends that she is calm, unaware of the bloody-minded emotions being displayed. She saunters over to her sister, her back to the male, and makes grooming noises with her jaws a few inches from her sister's head.
For a full five seconds, the male and Raptor Red's sister just stare unblinking at each other. Raptor Red nuzzles her sister's neck. Her sister recoils and bares her teeth. Raptor Red nuzzles her neck again.
Her sister turns her head and looks at Raptor Red, pupils full of hate. But the pupils contract, and her sister turns away.
The male rolls over and slinks across the ground in the other direction.
Raptor Red is only acting calm. Inside she's agitated, torn up. She wants to be a fully mated couple with her chosen male. She has a tremendous hormonal surge. But her bond with her sister goes far back. And when the male bares his teeth at the chicks, Raptor Red feels like attacking him. Forces are at war inside her head, and she can't figure them out.
She looks at the male, then at her sister and the chicks. She realizes that she doesn't want to leave her sister or her chicks - that bond is strong. It's the heavy hand of kin selection, the investment a sister is willing to make in her sibling's health and happiness and in the health of her chicks. It's a form of genetic selfishness. By helping your sister and her children, you're helping your own genes survive.
Of course, genes can't plan a strategy. Genes can't think, can't feel, can't mourn the loss of a loved one. Genes can't bite, can't bleed, can't feel pain. Genes are tiny pixels of inheritance, devoid of feeling. They're short segments of chemicals, each carrying commands for building small parts of a body or small portions of programmed behavior.
Raptor Red does think and feel and weigh the conflicting demands of her young consort and her sister. She does indeed carry genes that have survived ten million raptor generations by inducing Utahraptor females to favor their relatives. But she's no gene-dictated automaton. The genetic bond of sisterhood works through complex emotions and a conscious sense of the right thing to do.
Raptor Red has a deep pervasive belief that what matters is getting her young relatives into the next generation of breeders. That's more important than her own individual happiness or the happiness of her mate. Genes have given her this morality, genes that gave her ancestors a bit of an edge in reproduction generation after generation. And at this moment these very same genes are producing a terrible emotional conflict.
Raptor Red is close to loving her male consort. But she knows the young male might kill her sister's chicks. And if he tries to, Raptor Red will kill him.
The crime of infanticide is built into the Utahraptor family system, as it is throughout nature. Male genes demand it. What's a male to do if his consort already has young from a previous mating? Those chicks don't carry his genes. The cruel arithmetic is this: The male will help his own genes most by killing the young that aren't his, so he and his mate can get started raising a new brood.
Long before the time of Utahraptor, infanticide was commonplace among dinosaurs and tiny mammals and frogs. And long after Utahraptor it will guide the actions of male lions, male alligators, and male apes.
Raptor Red belongs to a species that is making a momentous transition in family life from a male-dominated pack structure to an incipient matriarchy. The adult females have become larger and stronger than the males. They can accept or reject suitors. They tend to mate for life. The ancestral raptors had a different social system. The male
s were larger. They fought each other to control all the breeding females in a pack. And they'd drive away or kill the chicks from different fathers, unless the mother left the pack with her chicks and struck out on her own.
That's how Raptor Red's species got its start. A group of sisters left a big pack and descended into a dry valley where their evolutionary path diverged. The mothers obtained greater power, and they're no longer at the mercy of the alpha males.
Raptor Red and her sister still carry genes of distrust, genes that were fixed ages before, when strange males were always dangerous to chicks. And these distrustful genes are still valuable, because males can still lapse into the vicious old ways. Raptor Red has seen it. She has seen Utahraptor chicks pulled to pieces when a strange male bonds with a mother whose mate has died.
And Raptor Red sees the slight upcurl of the lip in her young male when the chicks bump against him. She sees him stalk the chicks when he thinks Raptor Red and her sister aren't looking.
Raptor Red Page 12