Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

The acro starts accelerating in the wrong direction. The adult female raptor is almost on top of him. He pivots awkwardly on one foot and does a U-turn, lowering his armored forehead.

The acro just grazes the male raptor again and knocks him down. He leaps over the fallen tree, once more shaking the underground shelter of the aegi.

Run, run, run, run, the acro thinks. His heart-lung machinery shifts smoothly into overdrive. Every breath he draws through his nostrils goes directly to huge air cells in his neck and torso and skull. Every contraction of his rib cage sends air already in the cells up and forward into the compact lungs housed in the ceiling of his body cavity.

The air is forced at high speed into thin tubules that pass tiny capillaries full of blood pumped from the heart’s pulmonary artery. Energy-giving oxygen is transferred from air tubes to bloodstream, at an efficiency twice what mammal lungs can do.

The acro covers a half-mile before he slows down. He’s glad to be alive.

Those raptors - VERY DANGEROUS, and smart. He’s convinced that he just barely escaped a deadly three-way ambush. He’ll never again get close to any raptor.

The raptor chick struggles to its feet. It was sure it was about to be eaten. Its mother rushes by to snarl at the retreating acro. She stops and returns to her chick, nudging it hard. The chick falls over, but it’s suffered no vital damage.

The male raptor, on the other hand, is hurting -three cracked ribs from the blow of the acro’s forehead. It’s painful to breathe.

Raptor Red’s sister sits down next to her oldest chick. For the first time since she met the male, she doesn’t want to bite him. And right this minute she could.

Raptor Red shows up a few minutes later. She heard the commotion from beyond a sand dune, where she was helping the other two chicks dismember this morning’s kill. Her genetically programmed behavior isn’t ready for the scene that greets her.

Her mate is lying hurt on the ground. Her sister is sitting next to him, at a loss as to what to think or do. The chick, rapidly recovering, is sniffing down a hole, trying to catch whatever was making such a fuss underground. And piles of panic-shit from an acrocanthosaur are spread all about.

The male raptor is depressed. He’s thinking something like this to himself: What a dope! Why did I do that? Ouch - what a dope - why did I do that - ouch! - the chick isn’t related - and Raptor Red didn’t even see it - ouch!

He sees Raptor Red coming toward him. His pupils contract and dilate, looking like the lens of an autofocus camera. It’s a reaction of extreme excitement - and joy.

When in doubt in a social situation, groom is Raptor Red’s unspoken motto. She sits between mate and sister, alternatively nuzzling each.

The aegi’s nightmares always come when it’s daylight above ground and he’s deep asleep below. Sometimes the Horrors are huge and amorphous, giant vague shapes that threaten to crush him flat. His body shakes with convulsions. His feet make running movements. His jaws open and close in quick defensive bites. Tiny squeaky noises come from his mouth.

In his dreams he can never outrun the Giant Horrors. They envelop his world like a dense suffocating cloud. Just as he feels his body being crushed, the nightmare ends. He sighs, still asleep.

Sometimes the Horrors are smaller and more personal. He sees himself hunting through a lush forest. Ferns tower above his head. The air is moist and rank with the heavy scent of mushrooms. He hears his quarry, plump and vulnerable, scuttling between clumps of ground pine. He gives chase. He sees his prey close up and gets ready to lock his jaws onto its armor-plated rump.

Then the Long-Armed Horror strikes from above. He feels the air rush beside his body as the clawed fingers grab at his fur. He tries to jump up, but he can’t. Then the dream stops.

The worst is the Horror That Follows You. In this dream he’s asleep in his home, his body touching the four walls, floor and ceiling. He dreams that he’s happy and secure. But then his nose detects an awful smell. The soles of his feet are being licked by a fast-flickering tongue that is cold. He realizes too late that there is no way to run, no escape. The cold body coils against him.

That dream usually ends when he wakes up.

All the dreams are in black and white. And in all of them the feel and smell of the Horror is much worse than the sight.

But there are good dreams too. His favorite is the Endless Crunchy Worm With Feet. It goes like this: He’s hungry. He’s been searching for food all night. He hears a faint patter of hundreds of feet moving in rhythmic waves over dry leaves. He pounces. His molars hit a hard, curved carapace, tough armor that keeps his teeth from the luscious goodies inside.

He contracts his jaw muscles in his sleep. He feels the prey’s carapace bending. Pop - his molars go through. He feels the yummy body juices flowing into his mouth. He eats and eats and eats and never gets to the end of the prey.

It’s a wonderful dream. It’s a dream only an insectivorous little mammal can have. It’s a dream of catching a millipede.

Mammalian furballs dream. So do birds and big-brained dinosaurs like raptors. But a rich dreamtime requires much extra brain capacity where memory can mix with fantasy. Turtles and lizards and snakes sleep the dreamless sleep of the small-brained. So dreaming is an advanced evolutionary exercise, a way the brain can go on an extended journey into that other reality.

Mammals are dreamers par excellence. When the aegi ventures far into the dreamtime, his eyes flick back and forth inside their closed lids. His face muscles wrinkle up, and his lips contract into a tiny snarl. He runs to escape the Horrors - his minute five-fingered forepaws executing rapid but ineffectual cycles of locomotion as he lies on his side.

The aegi even squeaks in terror - or in satisfaction when he catches the dreamtime centipede.

The aegi dreams best in the late afternoon, before he wakes up for his nocturnal foraging expeditions. Shortly after sundown the earthquake-animals -that’s how the aegi labels the big-footed dinosaurs - curl up and go to sleep. Their heavy tread no longer threatens to crush his burrow. The night sounds begin. Insect wings hum. Creatures too timid to venture out on the meadows and forest floor in sunlight make delicate footfalls on the carpet of dried bracken at night.

In daylight the giant meat-eaters - raptors and acros - are the lords of their universe. But dinosaur eyes don’t do well in the dark. The hawk-style optics of raptors can detect a rainbow of colors in strong light - even beyond the spectrum seen by human eyes today. But in the dim light of dusk their visual acuity decays. They lose objects in the shadows. Outlines of potential prey and potential enemies become obscure.

It’s a penalty most dinosaurs pay for the visual richness they enjoy in sunlight. Evolution cannot maximize the efficiency of the same eyeball for both bright and dim light. The aegi has paid the opposite penalty from the dinosaurs. His eyes can’t stand strong light and can’t discriminate most colors. But in low-light situations, his visual system works superbly, resolving images invisible to dinosaurs.

When the first rush of cool night air funnels down to his burrow, the aegi pokes his snout out. He has to clear the shattered earth from the crushed burrow walls, pushing away the collapsed earth that plugged the entrance when the raptors fought with the acro. His long, sharp snout wiggles left and right, up and down - an anatomical trick no dinosaur can perform. The aegi has face muscles in his snout, muscles organized into a half-dozen groups that can move his lips and nose. By furball standards, dinosaurs have thin-skinned snouts nearly devoid of muscular tissue.