Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

The aegi’s jaws strike blindly and gnash twenty tiny holes in the dino hen’s cheek. Then the aegi locks his jaws onto a flap of ostrich dino lip, hanging on.

The ostrich dino hen grunts in disgust. She doesn’t like her brunch to bite back. She shakes her head.

The scorpion-killer feels himself being propelled a hundred body lengths. He falls. He scrambles toward the scent of his burrow. He reaches the edge of the hole, now churned up by the hen’s claws.

The hen drives all six claws down hard. They come up holding a wriggling piece of prey. She’s more careful this time. She doesn’t put her nose right up to her claw trap.

She flips the little body into the air.

Gulp!

Yeaccch!

It’s a frog. There’s nothing wrong with frogs for brunch, but she was expecting the taste of furball. Oh well, one gulp is as good as another.

Still, she pauses a minute, thinking, I grabbed a fur-ball - tossed it - it became a frog. Never saw that happen before.

If she were interested in metaphysics, she might invent the first dinosaur religion then and there. Instead she moves on, hunting, digging, and gulping.

Aegialodon the scorpion-killer stays absolutely still. He’s survived, and he’ll live to a ripe old age -eleven months. By that time his aegi genes will be in swarms of children and grandchildren.

Over a hundred million years later, the flow of aegi genes will produce wonderful creations -giraffes, elephants, rhinos, whales, bats, monkeys, chimps, Democratic senators, Republican majority leaders. Charles Darwin himself. All can be traced back to the supreme bug bopper, the Aegialodon.

Raptor Red doesn’t know why the little chick is dead. Its body lies peacefully in the sand, as if it were napping, not far from the pack’s new seaside nest. Raptor Red thinks it is a pretty chick. She always liked it best of her sister’s three children.

Raptor Red very gently touches her upper lip against the chick’s chest. There’s no blood, no visible wound. But the body is cool and stiff. The chick lost an internal battle two hours ago, overcome by a runaway respiratory infection.

Raptor Red has seen death a thousand times. She’s watched dinosaur viscera ripped out of still-living bodies. Still, this Utahraptor chick is one of the saddest sights she has seen.

Her male consort is nervous - he doesn’t want to be blamed for the death - and he tries to make himself inconspicuous. He sees Raptor Red’s sister walking slowly toward him, and he hides between two small dunes.

The chick’s mother approaches Raptor Red and stops, looks at the adults, and stares at each of them, then sees the chick in the sand. Raptor Red’s body language tells her that the pack has suffered a loss.

Raptor Red’s sister comes up to the dead chick and begins to make crying sounds. Raptor Red tries to console her sister by cooing and nuzzling her neck and by leaning against her chest. But the bereaved mother starts to howl and shake, her eyes wild and wide. First her neck, then her shoulders and thighs tremble. The other young chick scrambles away in fear - she’s never seen her mother like this. The oldest chick joins Raptor Red in preening her mother.

It does no good. Raptor Red’s sister collapses on her ankles, pawing at the chick, turning the little corpse over and over until its hide is covered with wet sand grains. Raptor Red is afraid to leave her sister alone but afraid to stay next to her too. Her sister’s weird moaning gets louder, and she swings her arms in spastic arcs.

Raptor Red pushes her sister’s body with her own. She presses her head against her sister’s neck, trying to stop the shaking. It’s all she knows how to do. It’s the Utahraptor way of comforting a loved one.

Raptor Red feels her sister’s body go limp and start to fall away from her - and then it stops and stays still. Something is holding her sister up from the other side. Raptor Red looks over her sister’s shoulder to see what it is.

It’s her male consort.

He’s pushing gently and making cooing noises.

Raptor Red and her consort spend two hours holding her sister. Gradually the moaning grows quieter, the shaking stops, and Raptor Red’s sister closes her eyes and goes to sleep. Raptor Red’s consort drags over some branches to make a temporary nest right there. The entire pack huddles together when sunset comes. It’s a difficult night. Raptor Red has to groom her sister every time she wakes up.

The morning comes, and Raptor Red feels drained. Her sister is finally sound asleep, snoring noisily. The young male looks at Raptor Red - she’s sitting up with a dull, lifeless expression. He nudges her. Then he decides that he must get her a present.

Off to the beach he goes, sniffing and digging at curious objects half buried in the sand and mud. He needs something to cheer Raptor Red up. He needs play-food.

Over the last months he’s watched her enjoy herself many times, poking and nipping and clawing at strange food objects, creatures of bizarre shape and pungent taste. Fish heads, dried lizards, bloated fur-balls, fresh-water clams that no raptor can pry out of their shells. He’s learned that Raptor Red likes food that challenges her mind.

What he wants to find is some animal so weird that he himself would never think of eating it.

Smells of rotten and half-rotten sea-critters come up from the sand, but none seems quite right. Some are too gooey and sloppy. Some have hard-edged body parts that cut his lip when he tries to pick them up.

An eight-inch-long object, pointed at both ends, has promise. It smells fishy in a general sort of way, but it’s not like anything he’s eaten. And it has a very strange outer shell with hairs and pointed things sticking out. He taps the body with his hind-foot. To his immense surprise the pointed body runs sideways between his legs and under a rock.

Sideways running - weird, he thinks. Carefully he lifts up the rock, and the pointy thing runs sideways the other way.

Fhhhhwhop! He jumps on the sideways-creature, smushing it down into the mud. Bubbles come up. He fishes down to grab the thing - but the thing grabs him.

His index finger suffers a sudden sharp pain, and as he pulls his hand up, the crab holds on with one of its big, heavy pincher-claws. This is perfect, he thinks.

He runs back to where the family is sitting. Raptor Red’s sister is still snoring. The chicks are just waking up. He bobs his head at Raptor Red. She doesn’t look up. He drops the crab between her legs, and it scuttles straight up her chest.

Eeeeep! Raptor Red makes a little cry and stands up. Suddenly she’s out of her mood and into figuring out this new thing.

She chases the crab up the beach, and her consort chases it down. They push it down into the mud, and they dig it back up. He holds it against a rock, and she tries to pry into the crab’s shell with her thumb and her teeth.

At last she succeeds in popping the bottom shell off. Her male consort refuses to taste it, but Raptor Red immediately chews off pieces.

She likes it a lot.

The rest of the day is spent crab-catching and crab-eating. They catch them together, and Raptor Red eats every one.

Raptor Red and her consort spend the day with the chicks. It’s not a bad life at all, being a pack of beachcombers. The sea offers many gifts. The oldest chick finds the fresh carcass of a half-ton sea reptile, a streamlined body with two pairs of backswept flippers. The head was already gone - bitten off in some unseen mortal combat below the waves.

Raptor Red tastes the meat. It’s like crocodile, with a bit of the aftertaste of turtle. It’s not salty at all and just a little overripe. It will feed the pack for days.