Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

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.

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.

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.