Raptor Red looks down at the confusion that she and the chick have caused. For an hour the deinonych pack moves around uneasily a quarter-mile away. Two large males approach the alpha male and dispute his position of leadership - his ignominious fall down the slope has lost him the respect of the rest of the pack. He backs away and retreats to the rear of the deinonych horde.
Raptor Red tries to hide the fact that her body has been thoroughly crippled by that last defensive kick. Her entire left side is immobilized by pain that shoots from hip to knee to ankle. She knows she cannot defend herself or her family anymore - but maybe she won't have to. Maybe the deinonychs have lost heart.
The deinonych pack does make a disorganized retreat to beyond a treeline.
The older chick hops over to Raptor Red and gives a war-whoop of victory. Raptor Red feels like cheering herself, despite her pain. We did well - we defended our family - we did very well, she thinks.
Raptor Red drags herself to the temporary nest -she wants to share the victory with her sister.
'Ooop-oop-oop.' Raptor Red coos a happy greeting. Her sister doesn't answer. Her eyes are wide open and still. Raptor Red sits quietly for ten minutes. Her sister's chest doesn't move, and her eyes don't blink as heavy snowflakes pile up around the eye socket.
It takes several hours for Raptor Red to accept the reality of her sister's death. Her left knee throbs terribly, but she doesn't notice. What she does feel is a near total loss of energy, as if the wind has been knocked out of her lungs and she can't inflate them again. Her sister was the one individual for whom Raptor Red would and did sacrifice her own well-being.
She looks around. She's alone. The two chicks are gone, their lingering scent trail leading upslope, in the direction of the cave. Raptor Red is unable to move. For the first time in her life, there's no spark inside, no motivation to struggle, to figure things out.
The snow blows in unpredictable gusts, and Raptor Red's body begins to shake in convulsive bursts of muscle contraction. Shivering like this will exhaust her in a hour. And then, her metabolic reserves used up, she will freeze to death.
Raptor Red lays herself against her sister's body. Its residual heat helps keep her warm for a few minutes longer. The cold has eased the pain in Raptor Red's left knee. Gradually she loses feeling in her other limbs too.
And she doesn't care.
A dull, heavy feeling of failure falls on her. She doesn't review her life one memory frame at a time. But deep in her consciousness she is aware that she's failed in the great tasks Nature gives each female Utahraptor. She lost her original mate before they reproduced. Then she lost another mate, still without producing chicks. And now she has lost her sister's orphans.
Raptor Red has a deep sense that the chicks have little chance in this dangerous region by themselves. Even the older chick isn't ready to survive on her own yet without an adult to help.
Raptor Red feels pain in her head. Her ears ache from the cold, and it hurts to breathe. She can still smell, though. She smells the pine trees and the segno bones. And now she smells the deinonych pack. They're coming back.
RAPTORS IN THE CLOUDS
MARCH
Raptor Red no longer can judge the passage of time. An hour. A half day. She has no idea how long she has lain next to her sister. It's night now, with weak light from a quarter moon. She's drawn up her legs as tightly as she can, trying to minimize heat loss from her body. And she's pressed her shoulders against her sister's body, exploiting the residual warmth. But even that heat source is drained after a while.
Raptor Red's mind is cloudy - her eyes are closed, almost frozen shut, but she sees bright, clear images that come and go in quick succession. These are the dreams that come before death.
She sees a mortally wounded Astrodon in bright afternoon sun. She sees the heavy body tilt and roll heavily on her mate. She tries to scream, but there's no sound in her dream.
A brilliant pterodactyl swoops down from the sun. Its wings are so shiny that Raptor Red tries to squint. She wants to jump up and bite those blind-ingly white wings. But in her dreams she can't move.
She hears the dactyl now, coming and going, and coming back again.
A crocodile breaks the surface of a pond, sending a slow motion shower of droplets high into the air. Each droplet glows, then transforms into a point of light.
Her sister's image condenses in the center of the light, close enough to touch, then fades.
Scents come and go too - mixed in ways they never are in life. The smell of warm iguanodon meat makes Raptor Red feel safe and content. The smell of tick-birds close up, about to groom the raptor pack, is pleasant too. Even better is the smell of a warm cave, lined with bark made pungent by the nearby droppings from the two chicks and her sister.
She tries to move her body to get close to the chicks, but she can't feel her legs.
A male raptor appears, a Utahraptor with wings. She calls to him, and he answers. It's her young male.
Her pleasant reverie is broken by the smell of Deinonychus very close. She growls and thrashes her arms, not knowing whether the scent comes from real enemies or the dreamtime. She tries to open her eyes, but there's only cold blackness out there. She lifts her snout and forces her eyelids up. Hate finally rouses her brain from sleep.
She sees the deinonychs now: twenty of them, their legs and torsos outlined by moonlight, showing no fear. Five are chewing on parts of the segnosaur carcass that Raptor Red piled near her sister. The other deinonychs are strolling around the edge of the nest, sniffing and marking the ground with their dung-sign.
Raptor Red tries to move her forepaws, but the deinonychs ignore her feeble threat. To them, she's already as good as dead.
The deinonychs squabble over the segnosaur remains, having a tug of war over a leg bone.
Several deinonychs cautiously approach Raptor Red's sister, sniffing and pawing at her body with their claws.
Raptor Red can't keep her eyes open - it's as if a heavy hand is pulling her eyelids down from inside her head, and she doesn't want to resist. The sounds of the deinonych pack stamping the snow with their feet are all around, but the footsteps merge into each other and become a cacophonicous mass. The deinonychs are scent-marking the Utahraptor nest, declaring it to be their territory, and she hates their smell - it's blocking all other scents.
The cold seeps upward through Raptor Red's legs and body. She begins to welcome the numbness. There's nothing to protect her from the wind where she lies, and each new gust spreads its anesthetizing effect further through her knees and torso and shoulders. A vague but profound feeling of defeat and resignation is taking hold of her spirit.
A series of unspoken thoughts and wishes play in her mind, making her body quieter and quieter. It doesn't matter anymore... there's nothing more 1 can do... I just want the hurt to go away. It's a combination of physiological shock that dulls her bodily responses and a final acceptance of her failure. The failure to carry out her duty as protector of those who carry her genes.
A deinonych bumps into her tail, catching the tip of his killing claw into Raptor Red's skin. A tiny message of pain travels from tail to Raptor Red's brain. It wakes her up for a second. Her right eye opens involuntarily. The deinonych stares at her for a second, decides that she's no danger, and saunters over to her sister's body. Raptor Red's eye follows his movement, but the images sent to her brain elicit no response.
The deinonych stops to sniff at her sister. He approaches her hind foot cautiously, turning his head one way and then the other, examining the deadly claw that in life had killed scores of dinosaurs far larger than he is. He reaches out with his own hind foot, pushing on the massive calf muscle.
Raptor Red's mind wakes up just a little bit.
The deinonych crouches down and extends his neck toward her sister's shoulder. Suddenly he gets bold and tries a quick bite at her lifeless neck. Raptor Red's other eye snaps open.
Curiosity and revenge overcome the deinonych's inborn horro
r of all Utahraptor. He remembers being chased by the great raptors many times in the six years he's been alive. He remembers going hungry because this particular Utahraptor pack stole carcasses from his own family.
He growls and grabs Raptor Red's sister by the neck, his head twitching and jerking in vicious spasms. He's so absorbed in venting his anger that he doesn't notice Raptor Red's head rising from the snow, her arms pushing her torso up from the ground.
Raptor Red's brain sends messages to her limbs and body. Waves of muscle contractions pass up and down her hindlegs, warming the tissue. The pain from her injured limb starts to glow again, but her brain overrides those signals. A very terrible emotion is welling up inside her, something irrational, something that makes her oblivious to the throbbing in her knee and thigh.
She pushes her body backward a few feet so her shoulders are braced against the rough bark of a pine tree. Then she drags her body into an upright position, half sitting, half standing, her hand claws digging into the tree trunk.
The deinonych sees the movement. Overcome with fear, he backs up and opens his mouth, and his fingers start to tremble. His eyes fix on Raptor Red's - her pupils dilate, contract, dilate again.
Five other deinonychs see her now, and they shift their weight back and forth from one leg to another, uneasy, unsure of what to do with this Utahraptor who seems to be rising from the dead.
Raptor Red staggers forward and rests her torso on her sister's body. Then she raises her neck and shoulders as far as she can, bringing her head eight feet above the ground. She clenches and unclenches her hand claws.
The entire deinonych pack watches her every move from a safe distance, beyond the reach of her still-dangerous forepaws. They want to start tearing apart the two Utahraptors but they're smart enough to know when to wait. The pack is used to waiting for hours while large victims collapse from their wounds. They've watched for as long as two days until a two-ton iguanodont at last sank down on knees and elbows, unable to get up again. The deinonych pack members are experts in waiting and watching.
Raptor Red has been operating on pure instinct for the last few minutes. But now she's aware of what she's doing. She knows she can't reach her tormentors. And yet she wants to prolong the time her sister's body is protected from those hateful deinonychs.
She decides to use her last weapon - sound. She fills her lungs deliberately. Her chest swells. Then she exhales, channeling the air through the echo chamber built into her nostrils. A powerful threat-noise, louder than she's ever produced before, rips through the cold air, tumbling snow from the pine branches.
The deinonychs crouch low and retreat another few yards. But they're not fooled by the threat-sound. They now know Raptor Red is incapable of charging.
And Raptor Red realizes that the deinonych pack will wait to come close until she dies. That's what she wants. She has satisfaction knowing that her sister's body will be safe as long as she herself is breathing. She makes another threat-sound, less loud this time. The deinonychs flinch.
The echo of her threat comes back from the snowy cliff face a mile away. The deinonychs turn to look at the source of the sound, but they don't retreat any farther.
Then another echo comes from the opposite direction, another Utahraptor threat-noise. The deinonychs bob their heads, look around and make chirping calls to each other. They're confused - the second echo wasn't like the first and it was louder.
Raptor Red's eyelids open very wide and she aims both her ears toward the new sound. She cries again, a strange combination of threat and greeting. Her call is answered immediately by a Utahraptor voice from upslope on the edge of the plateau.
It's a male voice.
The deinonychs crouch very low and stare intently up through the trees.
Raptor Red issues a long, low, rumbling growl. She swishes her tail explosively, sending snow into the air in a crystalline shower of white. Two young deinonychs turn and run away toward their nest near the streambed.
The deinonych pack leader stands firm, gnashing his teeth together. Six other adults come up to him " and stomp on the snow, side by side.
A moan, very deep and barely audible, comes from the trees upslope. The noise is getting closer.
The deinonychs look upslope where a savage form gradually becomes visible in the darkness. The male Utahraptor is standing absolutely still, with his eyes fixed on the deinonych pack leader.
Raptor Red gives a low, throaty greeting. The male responds, and the two begin a duetted battle-call. The calls become faster and louder with each cycle of response and counter-response. The deinonychs swing their heads back and forth, from Raptor Red to the male. Three of their pack lose their nerve and flee.
The battle duet stops abruptly. Raptor Red watches her male consort for a half minute. He slowly flexes knees and ankles, pauses, then charges. A pine sapling breaks into a dozen pieces as his five-hundred-pound body smashes the line of small trees between him and the deinonychs. Raptor Red's nostrils are overwhelmed by the pungent scent released from the male Utahmptor's throat glands.
The deinonych pack leader jumps seven feet into the air, his head banging into conifer branches. He comes down running, his feet skidding on the snow-slickened soil. He dodges the male Utah-raptor's hand claws by diving over toward Raptor Red.
She reaches far out with her thumb claws and snags the deinonych by the base of the tail. He fights back, swinging his hands over her face. Raptor Red closes her armored upper eyelid tight and bites the deinonych under his left shoulder. She can't reach his body with her one good hindclaw.
She lifts the deinonych up in her jaws and slams his head against the ground, throwing all the force of her neck and upper body into the blow. His hands grab at her face frantically.
She lifts him again and brings his head down onto the earth even harder. The deinonych goes limp.
Raptor Red opens her eyes and sees her male consort picking up another deinonych in his hand-claws. The deinonych body goes sailing over her head, upside down. Then she sees her consort just behind her, standing very tall.
The battle is over in just a few seconds. Raptor Red can hear the whimpering defeat-calls of the deinonych pack as they gather together and mourn their dead several hundred yards away.
Suddenly, Raptor Red feels dizzy - her head becomes light, her vision blurred. She sinks down on her knees, clutching her sister's body. The exertion of the fight has used up all her reserves of strength. She wants to sleep. But she hears a soft cooing a few feet away. A wonderful sound. She answers.
She feels a warm body leaning against her, and she smells her consort's fighting scent. She's not sure that she is still alive, but she's happy. A very deep sleep envelops her brain.
The light comes again inside her brain, this time an orange-yellow light from outside. It's morning light, a bright, warm spring morning. Her eyelids become so warm she blinks. Drops of hot water seep into the corner of her eye. There's a dank, heavy smell all around. She sees a mound of conifer branches heaped up on one side, with steam rising. She opens one eye a little farther and sees a clear blue sky reddened in one quadrant by a midmorning sun.
She smells meat - it's right next to her - and suddenly she's ravenous. Strips of fresh segnosaur steak and chunks of liver are within easy reach, and she gobbles down several mouthfuls.
'BleacccCCh!' She coughs up a piece of bone that got stuck in her throat. Coughing makes her sit up. She finds that she can wiggle her left hindtoes. That's a welcome surprise. And she can stretch all six fingers, flexing and unflexing the big meat-hook claws.
Feeling has come back to both legs - especially the left, which hurts terribly at the knee. Raptor Red grimaces. She doesn't know where she is.
She closes her eyes, and the smell of the young male comes back. She doesn't want to open them again for fear that the image will go away. Hot breath and a snuffling sound are right next to her ear and neck.
Something wet and hot bumps her eyelid hard, making her head recoil.
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She slowly opens her eye. There, too close to be in focus, is the muzzle of her consort. She reaches out and pokes his nose with her hand. He's really there.
The old white dactyl surveys the scene below as he rises on the morning thermal currents. The dactyl sees the two adult Utahraptors preening each other. Two chicks are feeding on meat in a new makeshift nest at the edge of the meadow. All around the nest are the signs of a desperate battle. Two dead deinonychs have been hurled into the lower branches of a tree. Tracks show that other deinonychs have fled with bloody wounds.
All the tracks will disappear in the hot sun by midmorning.
RAPTOR FAMILY VALUES
MARCH
Raptor Red eats her fill and goes back to sleep. She needs to sleep. She wakes again later the same morning. She looks at the clear blue sky. Bright March sun is transforming snow into vapor, and the layers of white evaporate in the open spaces, leaving cold remnants only in the deep shade.
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