Raptor Red leaves dreamtime gradually, in stages. Her morning dreams have been soft and warm and comforting. She's seen herself curled up with her male consort on one side and her two nieces on the other. Now, as she is crossing the boundary between sleep and consciousness, she feels safe. In her last dream of the morning, she's being guarded by a huge white dactyl who won't let predators come near.
She opens one eye. The light is so bright that she shuts it again. She moves her hand to shade her head and opens her eye again. She sees a huge white dactyl standing motionless six feet away.
Raptor Red snaps her eye shut and reenters the dream. The white dactyl is there, taller, more massive. Raptor Red's brain grapples with this most unusual duality.
Dreamtime and reality aren't supposed to be the same.
It wakes her up completely. She opens both eyes - there's the white dactyl. Raptor Red blinks twice and moves her head back and forth, the way she does to make sure of the identification of an immobile object.
Yes - that's a white dactyl. In fact, that's the white dactyl, her aloof companion since her childhood.
The big dactyl jerks his head down into the weeds and yanks on some meat scraps attached to a segno-saur carcass. Raptor Red pulls her head and shoulders back in alarm.
'Eeeep!' Her pupils dilate, and she utters a little alarm call. The white dactyl jumps straight up three feet and backpedals a couple of yards. The two predators stare at each other.
The white dactyl moves away and clatters his jaws together quickly, his outward sign of inner agitation. He settles down after a minute or two and starts playing with a deinonych body.
Raptor Red sniffs - and the air around her retells the story of the previous day. There's a dung-scent left by deinonychs - a smell full of anger and fear. But it's faint and fading away into nothingness. Much stronger and much nearer is the scent of her sister's chicks. They've been next to Raptor Red while she slept.
Raptor Red tries out each of her extremities, one by one, stretching and flexing and stretching. Her injured leg throbs at her first attempt to straighten the knee and ankle. But the other leg operates smoothly and painlessly, and her arms and neck, although stiff, are in operating condition.
It's already nine o'clock, and the ground is warm around her. She sniffs at the segnosaur carcass and picks out some soft meat. Swallowing three big chunks makes her feel even better.
A light breeze starts up and brings a strong smell from upslope. Raptor Red stops eating. She hobbles to her feet, using both hands and one hindpaw to carry her weight. She shuffles up to the body of her sister.
Her sister's body looks very slender, very small. Much smaller than it seemed in life. Raptor Red sits quietly for five minutes.
Another powerful scent seeps into her nostrils from a bush twelve feet away. Raptor Red raises her head and stares and sniffs.
The bush has been scent-marked by Utahraptor dung. Raptor Red closes her eyes and breathes in the acrid smell. Excellent. It's from her male consort. Its message is clear to all raptors: This spot and this family are mine.
Raptor Red's period of mourning is over. She won't forget her sister. Dreamtime will bring her back. But her conscious life has just changed. The tangled web of loyalties that has caused her pain for months suddenly becomes simplified.
Something old has clicked off inside her brain, and a new thing has clicked on.
An hour later Raptor Red sees three figures,
Utahraptors, coming down the slope - two tall, one short. The two tall ones are carrying parts of another segnosaur carcass.
Long before she can smell the three raptors, Raptor Red identifies them from their gait. The short one is the younger chick, still gawky and goofy and playful. The tallest is walking with a jaunty, self-assured rhythm, even though he's carrying a heavy piece of meat. That's her mate.
The other tall raptor causes a moment of confusion in Raptor Red's mind. The long stride, the aggressive carriage of the arms, a kind of defiance in the head and neckó
For a brief moment Raptor Red thinks her sister has come back to life.
She lowers her head and rocks back and forth. No, that one is her sister's older chick. Raptor Red hadn't realized how very much the chick had grown up to resemble her mother.
Raptor Red gets up as tall as she can and bobs her head in greeting. The male replies, offering the heavy side of meat as a greeting. She replies, performing the bonding dance duet as well as she can in her semicrippled state.
The male follows and spreads his hands wide. He's going into the full mate-bonding dance, with all the elaborate moves. He walks back and forth with exaggerated steps, lowering his head, presenting the meat, then withdrawing it. It's the first time he has been able to carry out the full bonding program without interruption.
The chicks don't like it, but they stand back. The smaller one snarls in a high-pitched voice. The taller one moves away, glaring and showing her teeth.
The male finishes his dance and lays the meat offering at Raptor Red's feet. She doesn't look at it. She stares at the male and bobs her head, initiating another round of the bonding dance. She wants to see him do it again.
He raises his head, pauses, then lowers his jaws, picks up the meat, and starts an encore performance.
The white dactyl visits every day for two weeks. The pickings are good - the pack hunts segnosaurs in and around the caves, and easy meat is so plentiful that the dactyl is allowed to help himself to nice pink flesh and innards too.
Both the male and the older chick hunt, but not together. The older chick acts more and more like an aggressive adult, and she won't let the male get close.
Every day Raptor Red gets stronger. For a while she doesn't even try to join the hunts - she knows she doesn't have to. The courtship-bonding dance is repeated every morning and assures her that the male will provide.
On the fifteenth day Raptor Red is getting uncontrollably restless. She walks around the temporary nest the pack has built from conifer branches. She tests her injured leg - it's up to eighty percent efficiency. She bites and claws at young trees, gnawing deep grooves in the bark.
She wants to get back to her role of active predator. She enjoys searching for prey-sign. She enjoys stalking. And she gets pleasure from making a kill.
She stands tall, sniffing the air. She sees the white dactyl poking his beak into a muddy pond. Raptor
Red lowers her body, and slinks toward the winged old-timer. She crawls to within twenty feet.
The old dactyl stops poking bubbles. Raptor Red leaps forward,. making as loud a noise as she can.
The dactyl jumps up and away and is airborne. He's pissed off. Adult raptors acting like chicks - this is wrong! he thinks as he flaps away, mumbling to himself.
Raptor Red turns, looks all around, and sniffs the scent-trail left by her mate. She's vaguely aware that her own rambunctious mood isn't just because she's nearly healed. It's also because it's spring.
The sunlight floods over their bodies and heads, making Raptor Red feel bouncy and playful. The days have been getting longer, and inside her brain Raptor Red unconsciously is using daylight length to mark her life's calendar. The window of opportunity for breeding is about to be announced.
This year, she's not afraid.
Here on the mountainside there are no acros. Prey is superabundant. And Raptor Red and her young male consort have proved to be very efficient hunters - when they work together.
Raptor Red whumps her consort very hard with her snout. She begins to understand the message of the sun - soon, very soon, it will be time to reproduce. He looks up, confused. His bioclock is a few days behind hers.
Four days later, a profusion of yellow and pink flowers explodes over the mountain shrubbery. Raptor Red and her mate spend a leisurely afternoon poking and chewing and pulling up the flowers. Every ten minutes or so she bumps him hard on the rump with her forehead.
Raptor Red notes that this day is marked by other changes. The white dactyl has sto
pped coming around, but to compensate there are new neighbors. The mob of tiny tro-odonts, the little fellows with inquisitive faces who like to slide, take up residence and sneak in to bite carrion beetles and steal tiny carcass scraps.
Raptor Red continues her sister's tradition of welcoming the playful scavengers. The tro-odonts in return squawk loud warnings anytime a large dinosaur approaches. And they provide playmates for the younger chick. Raptor Red and her mate move the pack to the inside of the segnosaur cave, and the tro-odonts camp outside.
Two days later Raptor Red feels too lively to stay at the cave, and she rejoins her pack on the hunt. They return at midday to hear an unholy racket near the nest-cave - two dozen tro-odonts are bouncing around beside themselves, hissing and screeching at a group of predaceous invaders. Raptor Red advances very carefully. There near the cave she sees a pack of Utahmptors, all young adults.
Raptor Red lies down and stays out of sight. She doesn't know what the strangers are up to. Her consort joins her. The strangers are uneasy. They walk slowly around the cave entrance, sniffing and depositing scent-markers.
Raptor Red's older niece comes up behind her but refuses to lie down. Instead she does exactly what her mother would have done - she advances straight toward the strange Utahraptors, head down, teeth bared. Raptor Red moves her muzzle between two bushes so she can watch what's happening.
As her niece strides into the clearing in front of the cave, five of the strangers retreat. One stands its ground. The niece walks up to the muzzle of the stranger and bobs her head once, twice, three times. He responds.
Courtship dance. Raptor Red identifies the movements. Then the pheromone detectors in her muzzle give the message: Sexually active male.
The duet is one-sided - the female chick makes far more grandiose bows and jumps and arm gestures. Raptor Red can see that the strange male is scared at first, but then he begins to respond. The dueting young couple moves in wide circles that lead them farther and farther away from the nest.
Raptor Red sits up, resting her body on her pelvis. She sighs. An immensely heavy weight seems to dissolve away. The burden of raising this chick to adulthood is finally lifted.
The older chick and her lover move down a gully and disappear from Raptor Red's view. The chick does not look back. Raptor Red gets up and investigates the abandoned dance floor. There's a small dung-pile left by the male stranger, and Raptor Red sniffs it thoroughly. In the future she will respond to this male as if he were family.
Raptor Red scans the area - she can see another strange Utahraptor far away, sitting on a boulder, making no aggressive moves but just staring back at the cave.
Her own mate joins her and he finds something her nose missed - a tiny dung-marker plastered against a tree, sixty yards from the cave. Raptor Red sees her mate lingering with great interest here.
The pheromone alarm goes off again in Raptor Red's brain: Sexually active female! She watches her mate's nostrils as they flare, sniffing the still air. The strange raptor sitting on the boulder stands up and makes a graceful head gesture.
'SkkkkkrrrrrAWK!'
Raptor Red emits a fierce threat and raises her muscular arms. She snaps her huge, sharp hand claws up and down as she advances with long strides toward the strange female.
Raptor Red's mate looks at the stranger, then back to Raptor Red. No contest would be a translation of what he's thinking. My mate is the most beautiful raptor in the world.
He adds his voice to Raptor Red's threat. The strange female lowers her body in a submissive gesture and slinks away.
Raptor Red looks back at her mate. He's bobbing his head and making short mock-charges. He bumps her rump with his forehead. Raptor Red feels a flood of emotions - aggression, joy, anger, relief. It's exactly one year since she lost her first male consort in the lowland mud of Utah.
Raptor Red is bumped by her mate. The two Utahraptor lovers make a slow dance around each other. Raptor Red makes submissive motions with her head and neck. The male replies with the identical bows and head-bobs. He mounts her once, but she shakes him off. He dances and bows again, attempts to mount, and again Raptor Red shakes him off - but this time more gently.
On the third try, Raptor Red lets the male mount her unhindered.
In early summer the great white dactyl returns to the skies over Raptor Red and her family, making low spirals to catch up on what's happened in the last several months. He looks down and can't believe what he sees. He swoops down closer. He's very surprised - and happy.
An unruly mob of Utahraptors is sliding down a slick mud slope. Adults scramble awkwardly up the incline. Little chicks dart in serpentine pathways past their elders. Everyone is coated with red muck.
The dactyl examines the raptors carefully. He recognizes three of the four adults, but the chicks are mostly new to him. The way the chicks play with the adults shows that there are two raptor packs mixed together. One is led by Raptor Red's niece and her consort, a short but powerfully built male. The other pack belongs to Raptor Red and her mate.
The white dactyl's shadow passes over the packs. Five tiny, timid Utahraptor faces look up at him. Two tiny chicks lie down next to Raptor Red's niece. Three snuggle between Raptor Red and her mate.
Both families retire later to their nests in the cave. The dactyl notes with satisfaction that the combined dung-scent posts of the two Utahraptor packs are respected by all other predators. The deinonych packs in particular shudder with apprehension when they sniff the air at the base of the hill, and they never dare to come closer than a mile.
Raptor Red watches the old dactyl make his familiar spirals over her head. Another gigantic set of white wings joins him, and the two pterodactyls engage in spectacular dives and zoom-climbs, gurgling greetings to each other and making elaborate neck movements.
The old white dactyl has taken a new mate. Late in the summer, three young dactyls join the two adults.
Ten years later the plague of acrocanthosaurs recedes when the big predators themselves are hit hard by multiple epidemics that rage through their dense populations. Some acros survive, but they will never build their numbers back up to extreme levels. Utahraptors - children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Raptor Red and her sister - will descend from their montane stronghold and colonize the low-lying floodplains and river-edge forest.
The sixth generation will invade Siberia, crossing the North Pacific land bridge that their ancestors used when they entered North America going the other direction. For two million years, Utahraptor will reign as top predator.
The family of Raptor Red will leave a legacy for the modern world. Where her first mate died, at the scene of the Astrodon fight, geological processes will seal the record. During the winter rains, a flash flood will cut a swath through the dried lake mud, ripping up gobs of sediment, carrying mud and bones a half-mile away to a shallow depression in the floodplain. Other dried-up dinosaur carcasses will come to rest here too - the armor-plated hide of a nodosaur lies jumbled against the astro and raptor bones.
A hundred million years of geologic time will do its work over the scene. First, layer after layer of mud and sand are heaped over the bones - every major flood brings in two or three feet more. During the successive epochs, a mile of sediment accumulates - some of it brought in by rivers, some by the shallow oceans that cover this part of Utah in the second half of the Cretaceous Period.
At last the oceans drain away, and the landscape rises. Hundreds of miles to the west, volcanic islands collide with the Pacific coast of North America. Then a microcontinent crushes into the coast. Repeated geological collisions release heat and compressive forces throughout Utah and Colorado, and mountains rise. The even layers of sediment, now hardened to rock, are fractured, twisted, and bent.
This parcel of real estate becomes a jagged landscape of young mountains, high plateaus, and interior desert basins. Ice ages come and go and come again, sending heavy spring and winter rains to engorge the mountain rivers that cut deep
arroyos through the many-layered sediment pile. In Africa a smart species of ape is evolving into a higher primate with the ability to chip stone tools and tame fire. This primate will spread to every continent, and learn to write down its experiences, and wonder how mountains formed and what fossils mean.
By the late summer of 1991, erosion has eaten into the tomb of the raptor and the astro. Their bones are rock-hard, permeated with mineral-rich water that fills every pore with brittle calcite mineral. As the floodplain rock crumbles away under the influence of rain and frost and summer heat, broken bits of fossil bone tumble down the slopes of the gullies. Telltale bone fragments lie everywhere, signals to alert humans that a dinosaurian bonanza awaits excavation by skilled hands.
In 1994 scientists will announce the discovery of more giant raptors in the sediments of Asia. Kids who love dinosaurs, and adults too, will name giant raptors as their second favorite dinosaur, after Tymnnosaurus rex. A significant minority - twenty percent or so - will say they like Utahraptor best.
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