Yes, her chosen mate, this young male who can be so courtly and attractive and graceful, still carries the genes to be a child murderer.
The young male doesn't know why he has such violent impulses toward the chicks. But he does know it upsets Raptor Red, and he doesn't want to do that. His intelligence and his devotion to Raptor Red can override ancient impulses.
The adult raptors remain in a state of extreme tension for the rest of the day. Every time the male gets up and walks around, Raptor Red's sister and her oldest chick stand with mouths open, menacing him. The younger chicks cower behind their mother, while the young male backs up and averts his eyes. Finally, as night falls and the pack must make a temporary nest, Raptor Red tries to bump snouts with her sister, who growls.
Raptor Red grunts to the chicks and walks over to her consort. She gives him a play bite on the neck, as she has done many times.
He thinks it's a very hard play bite.
Ridge-backs are everywhere - dangerous. Raptor Red's mind is in high alarm mode. She's on guard duty in the morning, sitting on the edge of a one hundred-foot cliff, looking down onto the plains, where three big gaggles of acrocanthosaurs are milling around, crunching the chewed-up carcasses left by the raptor pack.
The acro populations have boomed because of immigration from drought-stricken areas to the east. Raptors don't like to tangle with acros in large groups. So the Utahraptor packs have been shifting their hunting territory nearly every day to the north and west as the acro invasion gets worse and worse.
An acro is wandering up an arroyo where the spring rains have cut a deep gash in the red earth. It's a male, mature this season. He's been driven out of his family group - a fate that happens to all male acros at this time of their life. Now he has to find a piece of biological real estate to claim as his own.
It's an anxious time for any dinosaur. This one isn't full of bravado. He doesn't know yet that his species is the biggest and strongest predator in all of North America. All he knows is that a week ago he was safe and comfy in his family, sharing kills. Today he's on his own, and he feels awfully unprepared.
He's used to making short expeditions on his own, to investigate exotic scent trails. But up till now, whenever something frightened him, he could retreat back to mother.
He stops to lick the inside of his gums with his narrow triangular tongue. He can't put much pressure on his mouth lining because the tongue is very muscular and can't move much side to side. There's still a sore place where a prickly animal had gone whackity-'whack inside his mouth earlier in the season.
He doesn't like having to get all his food by himself. But when he tried to go back to his mother's group, she shooed him away.
Sniff... snff... snff... SNFFFFFF! Easy food - maybe - raptor smell! His mood improves. His family group has made a living by stealing kills from raptors. Acros don't feel like felons - they consider it as noble to steal a carcass as to make the kill themselves. More noble, because usually they waste less energy stealing.
The young acro has learned to associate the raptor-pack smell with easy-to-steal prey. Usually raptors don't fight back - unless the acros threaten the raptor chicks. Then all hell can break loose.
SNNNFFFFF. The acro presses his snout against the base of an old gnarled tree with a split crown. This is peculiar. The raptor scent seems to go up the tree. The acro hasn't run into this situation before.
The acro stares straight at the tree. He's not programmed to look up, because prey usually isn't found high above the head of an acrocanthosaur. He's programmed to look down and look around.
Some dried leaves and a branch fall on the acre's forehead. He shuts his wide upper eyelids. The top of his head is covered with thick, horny skin, reinforced below by layers of dense bone. Things falling on his head rarely do damage.
Whunk! A big dead branch hits him right between the eyes. He flinches.
This is a new sensation - being bombed by heavy objects from above. He doesn't like it.
The raptor scent becomes overpowering, and it's coming from right overhead. The acro does something he's never tried before. He rolls his head to the right and looks up with his left eye.
The raptor! his mind screams. The raptor is in the tree.
The acro backs up and measures the distance. He reaches as far as his neck and head will go.
Nope - too high, he thinks.
He snuffles around the tree and bumps it accidentally with the low horns that stick up in front of his eyebrows.
The dead, rotted wood shudders.
Wow -1 didn't know I could do that... make a tree wobble. The acro is discovering his own physical strength.
He bumps the tree harder, and it wobbles harder. The raptor chick twenty-five feet up hisses and screams.
Cool -1 can rattle the raptor would be a loose translation of the acro's thoughts.
The acro butts the tree hard. The raptor chick makes a panic noise.
The acro circles around, rolls his head, stops, lowers his snout, flexes his knees and ankles, and runs straight at the tree.
The tree trunk cracks away from its roots. The wood splinters straight down from the crown. Thick sections tumble on top of the acro's head and shoulders. He closes his eyes tight, hears scrabbling noises and a thunk.
The acro opens his eyes. Lying upside down on the ground, looking right back at him five feet away, is a half-grown raptor chick, bruised, dazed, and scared.
TWO-TIERED DRAMA
SEPTEMBER
At this moment, on that Early Cretaceous day, a double-level drama is being played out. On top of the stage made by the ground surface, raptors and acros play the leading roles of large and superlarge predators. Below the stage, underground, another storyline is being played out, by a supporting cast of tiny creatures who shun the daylight.
If you are the size of a mouse, a frog is a grotesque monster from a fairy tale. The Aegialodon is only a one-ounce insectivorous Cretaceous furball, a twitchy lump of hard muscle, long snout, beady black eyes, exquisitely sensitive whiskers, and spreading five-clawed feet fore and aft. A frog face has appeared in the aegi's burrow. The frog's mouth is almost wide enough to swallow the aegi.
A frog or a large beetle is a dangerous animal to the aegi. But a raptor is simply too big to be noticed. To the aegi, the acrocanthosaur and the raptors pounding the earth above his burrow are Forces of Nature, like earthquakes. He's been feeling his burrow walls shake for a half hour. Then a bunch of leaves got jammed into his burrow opening. And inside the ball of leaves was a burrowing frog who had just been kicked by an acrocanthosaur foot, moving the amphibian sideways across the ground and into the aegi's domain.
The frog, with his tiny frog brain, cannot grasp what's happened. All he knows to do is seek cover from the mammoth animal mountains clomping around and threatening to squash his little froggy body flat.
The frog squeezes into the aegi's hole headfirst. The aegi feels the unpleasant sensation of moist, bumpy frog skin pressed against his own face and ears. The aegi backs down his hole into the living chamber, a space two body-lengths wide, lined with soft, dry fur shed by the aegi. The frog is already there. It's backed its squat body into a corner and tufts of aegi fur are sticking to the wet amphibian skin.
It's totally dark inside. The aegi, with a good sense of smell and the finest high-frequency hearing of any Cretaceous critter, keeps track of what's going on topside. It's strangely quiet.
There are some situations your genes don't prepare you for. The acrocanthosaur above finds himself in this predicament now. He stands amid the pieces of shattered tree trunk, not knowing whether to bite, charge, run away, or just keep standing there.
The fallen raptor chick makes a sound that mimics a big tire going flat slowly. The acro is tempted to reach down, bite, and shake. That's what he always does to small prey items that make noise or wriggle. The chick is only 160 pounds - one-twentieth his own weight.
But raptors are dangerous. He noticed while growing up that
his mother always got tense around them. And next to the chick is a hunk of ostrich dino carcass that the chick had dragged up the tree. It's thirty pounds of fresh meat. Maybe he should just reach down, steal the meat, and run away. That would be safest.
To complicate matters further, a full-grown raptor is now screaming at him from several hundred yards upwind. One raptor isn't enough to be a serious danger to an adult acro. A single raptor usually keeps its distance from a single acro, and vice versa. But this Utahraptor is coming at him, waving her arms, lashing her tail, and acting as if she were a veritable kamikaze dino, bent on crashing into him.
The chick's body starts to come alive. Its hand claws are flexing and extending, and its hindfoot is vibrating.
Two raptors, too many - bite this one and run. The acro slowly makes up his mind. He can grab the little Utahmptor, shake the life out of it, and still have enough time to retreat out into the open ground, away from the adult raptor, where he can defend himself if necessary.
The acro uncoils his neck from the tight S-curve he normally carries it in. He opens his jaws, three feet from snout tip to ear. The chick starts to roll over, but its right side is still too stunned to stand up.
Below, the aegi furball hears a high-pitched sound, very loud, almost painful to his mammal ears. Then he hears a terrible collision noise, the ground rumbles and quakes, and his burrow collapses. Soil and roots momentarily pin the frog and the aegi down onto the floor of the living chamber.
The acro never saw the other adult raptor coming. Just before he can snap his jaws shut on the chick, the acro's aim is spoiled by a mind-boggling noise from behind. He ducks instinctively.
The male raptor hits the back of the acro's neck with his foreclaws. The clawtips rake diagonally down and backward, just missing the acro's eyes.
The skin is tough here. The acro shakes his wide neck and torso violently, flinging the male raptor off onto the pile of broken wood. The acro leaps with both feet, missing the raptor but destroying the domicile of the aegi.
Get me OUT OF HERE! the acro's brain yells at all his motor nerves. His reflex-loops start firing at random. He whips his tail around, not aiming at anything in particular, hitting the male raptor by pure luck.
The acro starts accelerating in the wrong direction. The adult female raptor is almost on top of him. He pivots awkwardly on one foot and does a U-turn, lowering his armored forehead.
The acro just grazes the male raptor again and knocks him down. He leaps over the fallen tree, once more shaking the underground shelter of the aegi.
Run, run, run, run, the acro thinks. His heart-lung machinery shifts smoothly into overdrive. Every breath he draws through his nostrils goes directly to huge air cells in his neck and torso and skull. Every contraction of his rib cage sends air already in the cells up and forward into the compact lungs housed in the ceiling of his body cavity.
The air is forced at high speed into thin tubules that pass tiny capillaries full of blood pumped from the heart's pulmonary artery. Energy-giving oxygen is transferred from air tubes to bloodstream, at an efficiency twice what mammal lungs can do.
The acro covers a half-mile before he slows down. He's glad to be alive.
Those raptors - VERY DANGEROUS, and smart. He's convinced that he just barely escaped a deadly three-way ambush. He'll never again get close to any raptor.
The raptor chick struggles to its feet. It was sure it was about to be eaten. Its mother rushes by to snarl at the retreating acro. She stops and returns to her chick, nudging it hard. The chick falls over, but it's suffered no vital damage.
The male raptor, on the other hand, is hurting -three cracked ribs from the blow of the acro's forehead. It's painful to breathe.
Raptor Red's sister sits down next to her oldest chick. For the first time since she met the male, she doesn't want to bite him. And right this minute she could.
Raptor Red shows up a few minutes later. She heard the commotion from beyond a sand dune, where she was helping the other two chicks dismember this morning's kill. Her genetically programmed behavior isn't ready for the scene that greets her.
Her mate is lying hurt on the ground. Her sister is sitting next to him, at a loss as to what to think or do. The chick, rapidly recovering, is sniffing down a hole, trying to catch whatever was making such a fuss underground. And piles of panic-shit from an acrocanthosaur are spread all about.
The male raptor is depressed. He's thinking something like this to himself: What a dope! Why did I do that? Ouch - what a dope - why did I do that - ouch! - the chick isn't related - and Raptor Red didn't even see it - ouch!
He sees Raptor Red coming toward him. His pupils contract and dilate, looking like the lens of an autofocus camera. It's a reaction of extreme excitement - and joy.
'When in doubt in a social situation, groom' is Raptor Red's unspoken motto. She sits between mate and sister, alternatively nuzzling each.
THE CUTTING EDGE OF BUG BOPPERS
SEPTEMBER
The aegi's nightmares always come when it's daylight above ground and he's deep asleep below. Sometimes the Horrors are huge and amorphous, giant vague shapes that threaten to crush him flat. His body shakes with convulsions. His feet make running movements. His jaws open and close in quick defensive bites. Tiny squeaky noises come from his mouth.
In his dreams he can never outrun the Giant Horrors. They envelop his world like a dense suffocating cloud. Just as he feels his body being crushed, the nightmare ends. He sighs, still asleep.
Sometimes the Horrors are smaller and more personal. He sees himself hunting through a lush forest. Ferns tower above his head. The air is moist and rank with the heavy scent of mushrooms. He hears his quarry, plump and vulnerable, scuttling between clumps of ground pine. He gives chase. He sees his prey close up and gets ready to lock his jaws onto its armor-plated rump.
Then the Long-Armed Horror strikes from above. He feels the air rush beside his body as the clawed fingers grab at his fur. He tries to jump up, but he can't. Then the dream stops.
The worst is the Horror That Follows You. In this dream he's asleep in his home, his body touching the four walls, floor and ceiling. He dreams that he's happy and secure. But then his nose detects an awful smell. The soles of his feet are being licked by a fast-flickering tongue that is cold. He realizes too late that there is no way to run, no escape. The cold body coils against him.
That dream usually ends when he wakes up.
All the dreams are in black and white. And in all of them the feel and smell of the Horror is much worse than the sight.
But there are good dreams too. His favorite is the Endless Crunchy Worm With Feet. It goes like this: He's hungry. He's been searching for food all night. He hears a faint patter of hundreds of feet moving in rhythmic waves over dry leaves. He pounces. His molars hit a hard, curved carapace, tough armor that keeps his teeth from the luscious goodies inside.
He contracts his jaw muscles in his sleep. He feels the prey's carapace bending. Pop - his molars go through. He feels the yummy body juices flowing into his mouth. He eats and eats and eats and never gets to the end of the prey.
It's a wonderful dream. It's a dream only an insectivorous little mammal can have. It's a dream of catching a millipede.
Mammalian furballs dream. So do birds and big-brained dinosaurs like raptors. But a rich dreamtime requires much extra brain capacity where memory can mix with fantasy. Turtles and lizards and snakes sleep the dreamless sleep of the small-brained. So dreaming is an advanced evolutionary exercise, a way the brain can go on an extended journey into that other reality.
Mammals are dreamers par excellence. When the aegi ventures far into the dreamtime, his eyes flick back and forth inside their closed lids. His face muscles wrinkle up, and his lips contract into a tiny snarl. He runs to escape the Horrors - his minute five-fingered forepaws executing rapid but ineffectual cycles of locomotion as he lies on his side.
The aegi even squeaks in terror - or in satisfaction when he
catches the dreamtime centipede.
The aegi dreams best in the late afternoon, before he wakes up for his nocturnal foraging expeditions. Shortly after sundown the earthquake-animals -that's how the aegi labels the big-footed dinosaurs - curl up and go to sleep. Their heavy tread no longer threatens to crush his burrow. The night sounds begin. Insect wings hum. Creatures too timid to venture out on the meadows and forest floor in sunlight make delicate footfalls on the carpet of dried bracken at night.
In daylight the giant meat-eaters - raptors and acros - are the lords of their universe. But dinosaur eyes don't do well in the dark. The hawk-style optics of raptors can detect a rainbow of colors in strong light - even beyond the spectrum seen by human eyes today. But in the dim light of dusk their visual acuity decays. They lose objects in the shadows. Outlines of potential prey and potential enemies become obscure.
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