Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

The dark body of the elasmosaur speeds up just a little, and its long, snakelike neck coils into tight S-shaped flexures. Four tapered flippers give the elasmosaur a smooth maneuverability.

Three squid are plucked from the school by darting strikes of the elasmosaur head. Then two more disappear, struck from below and behind. The elasmosaur thrusts its neck from the squids' blind quarter, the direction where their visual detection systems work least well.

Finally another squid is impaled on the forward-slanting elasmosaur teeth.

Just then, the elasmosaur is forced to bank left in an emergency evasive turn. It’s bumped something large. No worry - the elasmosaur can see the unmistakably lumpy form of a sea-turtle, plowing through the water with its two fore flippers. There’s a bright explosion of green light - the turtle has bitten a jellyfish.

The elasmosaur banks again, this time to avoid a pair of Meer-Krokodil, an ocean going crocodilian with the shape of a long-bodied shark.

The raptor pair climbs a rock ledge to get a better view, but they can see little of the three-dimensional aquatic ballet. They hear a flopping sound coming from a pool below the rock. Raptor Red pokes her hand in to investigate, but something wet and awful wraps itself around her fingers. Hundreds of tiny hooks adhere to her skin. When she scratches with her other hand, a pretty coiled shell falls, and dozens of sinuous tentacles writhe around. Raptor Red kicks the shell with her hindfoot and watches the ammonite right itself in the water six feet offshore. A Meer-Krokodil with armor plate embedded in its back snatches the ammonite and swims quickly away into the depths.

Raptor Red thinks about the sea. Slimy things -grubby things - too-crunchy things - big, fast, scary things. It’s all too much. She leans hard against her consort, and he leans back. She’s glad she’s a land animal. She’s glad she’s pair-bonded.

The sensory input is too confusing. Raptor Red likes poking at unknown animals, discovering things that move and sound and smell different. But this watery world is too full of strangeness.

She sits down. Her consort sniffs the air for a few minutes, then joins her. He leans toward her and she leans toward him.

The old white-winged dactyl awakens early, to take advantage of the exceptionally fine masses of air rising over the beach. Sitting at the edge of his nest, he opens and closes his twenty-foot wings slowly, stretching the thick wing-finger tendons at the four joints, getting the winter night out of his muscle fibers. This is his preflight warmup.

The entire wing is held by just a single great finger, number four counting from the thumb outward. He adheres to a strict program of exercises to limber up the living machinery that will keep that finger operating in peak condition once he is aloft.

He tests the air and turns his body upwind. He props his torso up at an angle, holding on to the nest with the three small hooklike claws on each wrist, and folds his wing tight against his body. He flexes his knees and elbows and wrist, lowering his body.

Then he jumps, hurling himself off the edge of the cliff.

His body plummets down fifteen feet, gathering momentum. Just as he seems doomed to crash into the surf, his flight-finger muscles contract at the elbow and shoulder, putting tension on the thick finger tendon. The muscle force instantly is passed outward as the tendon flips open the four finger joints and locks the wing in extended position. Air flows over the top wing surface, creating lift.

The dactyl hears a whoosh of air generating the force that pulls the wing up. His body tilts. He’s airborne.

Automatically he twists one wing finger up and one down and banks into a spiral-climbing turn. It takes a full minute to make a complete circle, and another, and another, and another.

The circles get wider as he ascends. He enjoys the feeling of effortless upward flight. At fifteen hundred feet the light of the rising sun hits his wings and floods his body tissue with warmth. This is the moment he likes best. His circulatory system responds, opening capillaries close to the skin so the solar energy can be absorbed.

The dactyl banks steeply, and the wind sends him scooting at high speed parallel to the shore. It’s exhilarating.

At ground level it’s still dark. But the rising sun is yet below the horizon. The dactyl’s acute eyesight lets him see shapes and movement on the dimly lit beach. He likes to check out the situation on the ground at this time of day.

He can see two Utahraptor packs. One is made up of his old friends, Raptor Red and her sister, and

Raptor Red’s male consort, plus one large and one small chick. The other pack has three young adults and is camped a half-mile away. The white dactyl swoops lower to inspect Raptor Red’s pack. They are up and awake and milling around. Their movement patterns are awkward and violent and uncoordinated. That’s not how a well-organized raptor pack should look.

The dactyl sees movement in the deep shadows behind the beach, in the hollows between the lines of sand dunes. Two very large dark shapes are inching up the dune face toward the raptors. He knows what that sort of movement means - giant predators are stalking the raptors. And the raptors don’t know it.

On a normal morning one adult raptor would be on sentry duty, sitting on the dune crest to prevent a surprise attack. Today all three adults are circling each other on the beach, ignorant of the danger from the dune field.

The old dactyl has a fondness for Raptor Red and her pack. He thinks of them as his Utahraptors. They’ve been his meal ticket for several years - as were Raptor Red’s parents before them. It’s not that he views them as his family - he has a subconscious knowledge that raptors have no significant genetic ties with his own kind. But he has bonded, at a distance, to this raptor group. He views them as the living center of his territory.

He banks very steeply and dives. At thirty feet he levels out, gravity giving him sixty-mile-per-hour velocity. Sand grains are whipped into the air by his slipstream as he skips over the dune crests. A three-ton body flattens itself onto the dune as the dactyl buzzes the last crest before the beach.

The dactyl gives a high-pitched alarm call. He expects an instant response. The raptors have learned that he doesn’t give alarms in jest.

The raptors ignore him.

Raptor Red’s sister should be the morning sentry. On most days she wakes up earlier than the rest of the pack, and she’s naturally suspicious of any unknown sight or sound or scent. But this morning she woke up in an angry state of mind. For no particular reason - other than the fact that she still finds his presence irritating - she walked over to where the young male was sleeping and bit him.

He snarled and withdrew to the foot of the big dune. Now he is walking back and forth, half awake, growling softly. He didn’t sleep well. All the strange sounds coming from beyond the dunes bothered him. Strange Utahraptors came and went and left scent-signals. Even worse was the faint smell of giant predators. He hoped they would be free of acros forever.

Raptor Red is standing between her sister and her consort. She hates being in this position. She’s making soft gurgling noises, looking back and forth at the two creatures she loves most in the world.

The older chick is next to her mother, hissing loudly with all the bluster adolescents have when they mimic adult behavior.

Raptor Red walks slowly, deliberately to her sister and nudges her. Her sister stops making threatening motions and turns abruptly away.

One crisis dealt with, Raptor Red turns to the young male. He’s busy testing the morning air with his snout. Raptor Red sniffs too. Her heart sinks. There it is again - the scent of female Utahraptors, strangers.