Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

It’s a bigger flood than even the long-lived dactyl has seen. Floods of this magnitude occur so infrequently that there’s no memory stored in the raptor genetic code. Once a thousand years is simply too rare an event. Raptor Red has an instinctive inventory of responses to the usual types of storms, to the cloudbursts her species experiences every year. But she cannot be prepared for this night.

Many raptors will die. Hundreds of iguanodons will drown, their bloated carcasses washing downstream and going aground on sandbars in Colorado. Mother Crocodile will survive, carried far to the east by the flood. After the flood is over, she will re-immigrate, swimming slowly back upstream. She will build another nest close to where her old one was buried in mud.

Raptor Red would die if she were alone. She cannot come up with a tactic of survival by herself. But her sister can.

Raptor Red’s sister has different behavioral genes - all dinosaur siblings differ a little bit this way, except for rare identical twins. Raptor Red’s sister is too high-strung, too quick to violence, too eager to attack in the face of hopeless odds, too slow to recognize when she should move her brood away from danger. Raptor Red is smarter, calmer, and a much better tactician in the hunt.

But Raptor Red doesn’t know how to swim in a strong current or how to climb trees in pitch-darkness. Her sister does.

Raptor Red deliberately follows her sister now, walking through the dark water. The enormous load of sand and silt carried by the flood increases the kinetic energy of the current. It’s like walking through liquid cement being shot out at high velocity.

Raptor Red slips and falls halfway, her left knee going down into the moving muck. The chicks scream. Her sister comes back and leans against Raptor Red. Two chicks jump ship, transferring to their mother’s body. Raptor Red gets up.

Her sister leads them deeper into the water. Raptor Red feels her feet losing contact with the ground. She thrashes her tail, trying to swim back to higher ground. But her sister keeps swimming with the current, not trying to fight her way across the trajectories of maximum hydraulic energy.

Raptor Red starts to swim too. She would swim slowly in calm water, but now, swimming parallel to the current, her velocity is added to the flood-water’s. Trees zip by. A bull astro, looking dull and confused, stands like a stone bridge in the current, the flood splashing high on the upstream side of his legs. He’ll live through the night by simple virtue of his forty-thousand-pound inertia.

Raptor Red has not been dependent upon another member of her species since she was a nest-bound chick, unable to go out on her own. On this terrible night she decides to follow her sister, even though it makes no sense. Raptor Red is impressed by her sister’s steady, unruffled response - either she is mad or she knows how to escape.

The two raptor sisters swim for three hours. It’s actually not difficult. They keep just enough speed beyond the current to navigate easily. Other raptors will exhaust themselves fighting the current. They’ll give up and float helplessly. And they’ll be drowned when they get entangled in fallen foliage or swept up in whirlpools.

A tall, dark massive grove of centuries-old conifer trees looms up on the right. Raptor Red’s sister turns toward them. Raptor Red follows close behind.

They bump into the fallen trunks of smaller trees, and Raptor Red feels her knees get bruised and bumped and bruised again. She grabs at a low-hanging branch, digging her foreclaws deep into the bark. This brings relief - the current is gentle. Raptor Red could hang on for hours.

But her sister goes on, swimming in between the biggest, oldest trunks. Reluctantly, Raptor Red lets go and follows. In a few minutes that branch will be under water.

At last her sister stops at the base of a huge tree. Its trunk slants at a forty-degree angle; its top is jammed into the crowns of six other big trees. It has half fallen down, but it doesn’t look like it will fall further that night.

Raptor Red’s sister reaches up with both hands, grabbing the bark. Then she flexes her hips down with a quick, powerful jerk. Her two hindlegs grab the trunk underwater. She moves her right leg up and grabs the bark opposite her right hand. Then she repeats the operation with the left hindleg. Then she shifts her right hand up - then the right hindleg.

Slowly, very deliberately, with great strength and slow coordination, she climbs the sloping trunk. Ten feet, twenty feet. She stops when she reaches the crown, where a maze of branches extend at right angles to the trunk. There are already some flood refugees wedged up there. A half-grown Yellow Snout raptor glares balefully at her. Raptor Red’s sister extends her head, opens her mouth, and utters a very low snarl.

The Yellow Snout falls backward but catches himself in the crown of another tree.

Raptor Red has watched her sister’s climb in amazement. She had no idea that Utahraptor bodies were capable of climbing. Last year she chased some

Deinonycus, the smaller raptor species, up trees and saw them ascend beyond her reach. She hadn’t attempted to follow.

Raptor Red is not too proud to learn by example. If her sister can climb that high with chicks hanging on, so can she.

Raptor Red grabs the bark with her foreclaws. The bark is surprisingly hard, and her claws slip off. She grabs again, piercing the bark with the sharp claw tips. She uses her instinctive style of claw-work, the style she uses when she attacks a thick-hided astro. Her finger-tendons flex at maximum power. The claw tips dig deeper. They hold.

She places the sole of her right hindfoot against the tree trunk, flexing her rear toe so the claw grabs into the bark. Her killing claw too now becomes a strong climbing apparatus. Digging the killing claw into the tree is a lot like slashing through the skin of a big iguanodon - except in climbing the motion is much slower and more carefully controlled.

Instinct and intelligence work together to make Raptor Red a tree-climber. Climbing is not really new for her. She’s climbed up the hulking carcasses of astros on several occasions. She’s climbed up the backs and necks of live cow iguanodons a dozen times. Climbing this tree really isn’t more difficult. The tree doesn’t try to shake her off, the way a struggling prey-victim might.

Raptor Red thinks through every step. She modifies her instinctive attack movements so that they keep her securely on the tree, going upward. Utah-raptors are too big to be regular climbers. Nature imposes strict rules of engineering. The bigger the animal, the tougher it is to move vertically.

A Utahraptor, weighing five hundred pounds as an adult, isn’t born with the confidence to climb. But it can be learned. Raptor Red is learning this night.

Raptor Red reaches her sister. The raptor pack huddles closely, hanging on to each other and to the branches. When their claws cut the young branches, their nostrils sting with the smell of poisonous sap. Raptor Red feels the tree swaying and shuddering as fallen logs wash against the base of the trunk. The water is still rising. The moon is blocked by heavy clouds, and the rains have spread from the western hills to directly overhead.

Raptor Red is cold.

The sun finally breaks through after thirty-six hours of rain. The Yellow Snout raptor’s grip was loosened by the chilling breeze. He fell and was drowned. Raptor Red heard other creatures - she couldn’t identify the species - fall too. Most were small. Some were pushed off their branches by newcomers who were stronger and meaner. Two or three were large and made loud splashes when they hit the water. There were screams and hisses too, marking fights for the safest perches.