Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

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.

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.