Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

Snap! She jumps up and bites at the whitish fleck. No taste. No crunch.

Another whitish speck comes down. She watches, stone still, to see what the bug will do.

She takes a very shallow breath. The bug zips into her nostril and dissolves immediately, leaving a cold, wet sensation for a split second.

Cold bug. Strange, she thinks to herself.

The night becomes frigid, but the sisters find abundant pine needles to build a temporary nest, and the older chick helps like an adult in this housekeeping chore. The scent and sounds coming from the montane forests show that there’s plenty of game.

One of their local neighbors is a small iguanodon species with a spotted hide who runs in big herds and is easy to kill.

The pack wakes up to a heavy fog clinging to the ground. Raptor Red’s sister is thirsty. Up ahead is a pond nestled among lichen-covered boulders. She trots ahead of the rest of the pack and squats down.

But as she stoops to drink, she whacks herself against a rock, bruising her nostril. At least that’s what she thinks.

She examines the pond edge carefully. There are no rocks in sight.

Again she stoops, and again she whacks herself.

She growls at the water. She hisses. The water doesn’t ripple at all.

Weird water, she thinks. Bad water.

She reaches out to scratch the pond. Her middle finger hits the surface and bounces off.

Now she stands up and screeches a full threat.

Raptor Red and the older chick rush up to help defend her.

Raptor Red’s sister reacts the way she always does. She thrusts her right hindfoot at the pond. I’ll fix you - I’ll rip you open with my killing claw, she’s thinking.

Her claw hits the pond and slides forward. She slips and falls on her rump. She expects a splash. She gets a knock on her dinosaurian derriere instead.

Raptor Red is very curious about this strange hard water. She takes a more inquisitive, less confrontational approach to the problem than her sister. She presses one foot hard against the water’s surface where some reeds are growing. Cold water oozes up alongside the reeds.

CRACK! A jagged piece of water breaks off. Raptor Red backs up. She’s never seen water act like this.

She sniffs. She nudges the water with her snout. Then she bites tentatively at a piece. She tries to drop the piece of water, but it sticks to her lip. She shakes her head and the piece of ice drops and shatters against a rock.

Late that afternoon, it snows.

Raptor Red watches, fascinated, as the wet, cold, fluffy layer gets thicker and thicker on the ground. The small chick huddles against her side, shivering. Shivering is why Raptor Red’s pack can survive in this climate - it turns up their internal thermostat so heat production from body tissue increases.

Raptor Red has noticed that the ponds and rivers here are devoid of crocodiles and turtles that are so common at lower elevations. Crocs and turtles can’t shiver.

Raptor Red’s sister doesn’t like the snow, and all her growling and hissing just seems to make the snow come down faster. She glances at her chicks. Both are now shivering next to their aunt.

Must find a hole, the chicks' mother thinks to herself. Raptor Red’s sister has always been the best of the pack in finding holes to hide in.

She sets out with grim determination. Cold can be as dangerous to chicks as an acrocanthosaur. She needs a burrow to shield her family.

For three hours the pack searches for shelter. The snow gets heavier, and the younger chick is having a hard time as it high-steps through the freezing mixture of mud and slush.

The raptors' thighs and shins are in no danger of freezing because the blood vessels are arranged to save heat. Arteries with hot blood going down the legs pass alongside veins coming up from the feet carrying blood chilled by the cold ground. The heat is transferred from the descending hot flow to the ascending cold.

That way the upper legs don’t get drained of body heat.

The foot tissue itself can operate at very low temperatures. It’s a trick that the raptors' relatives, the birds, also have. But the belly tissue of the little chick has no such protection, and it’s in imminent danger of frostbite.

The chick whines and stuffs its nose into Raptor Red’s armpit. Raptor Red starts to worry. She realizes that the chick could die in another hour or so.

Raptor Red follows her sister as the visibility drops to zero in the swirling snow. The cold, heavy flakes whacking into her eyeballs makes Raptor Red close her eyelids so only a narrow slit remains to see through. Her sister goes up through a heavily wooded ridge and then stops when a heavy, pungent odor causes her nostrils to twitch. The smell is foreign - and warm.

Her sister growls under her breath and advances through the dense conifer needles.

A strange noise comes from a crevice in the rocky ledge ahead. A pair of pale blue eyes stares out from the dark interior of a cavern.

Raptor Red and her sister advance side by side into the mouth of the hole. The blue eyes retreat.

Raptor Red feels the faint swoosh of air that a claw makes. She stoops, and a trio of long, straight claws just miss her head.

Only a moment passes, and then she hears her sister attack in the darkness. There’s a heavy thumping noise. Then a screech.

Raptor Red can smell blood. It’s her sister’s. But she can’t see a thing in the cave.

She sniffs and slowly walks farther into the darkness. It’s very quiet. She bumps into something inert, a big lifeless body that smells of earth and conifer roots. Her sister is already chewing on the strange carcass.

The morning breaks cold but clear. Warm red light seeps into the cave. Raptor Red wakes up and checks on the chicks. They’re both still snoring little raptor snorts, half buried in a nest of conifer bark.

Her sister is already up and out and feeding on the dead segnosaur carcass.

Raptor Red comes out to investigate. The segnosaur has a smell totally foreign to the raptor’s olfactory memory bank. And its shape is bizarre. The long neck and small head with weak teeth are like an ostrich dino’s. But the awkward-looking body with wide, spreading hindfeet is thoroughly un-ostrich-dino. And the hands - the hands have huge, straight claws for digging.

The cave is the segnosaur’s home. It dug out an elaborate tunnel system to escape the worst of the snowy weather. Segnos are the only dino family specialized for major excavation. Right now, in the

Early Cretaceous, segnos are montane rarities -species that can be found only at high altitudes. This mountain-loving habit has kept them from meeting the normal inhabitants of the lowlands, like Utahraptor.

Raptor Red’s family has no experience to guide them in dealing with segnos, and no instinct either. Segno front claws are dangerous slashing weapons - Raptor Red’s sister was very lucky.

Raptor Red gives the segno’s body a thorough sniff-search and visual examination. Her olfactory inventory doesn’t detect any sign of poison. She takes a bite of the liver that her sister has dragged out of the carcass.

Raptor Red notices her sister’s wound: a deep gash over the waist, just in front of the left hip. When her sister shifts her weight, the wound bleeds.

The cave proves to be a splendid lair for the raptor clan. The two adults can go out hunting whenever it’s sunny - and that’s every other day or so. And whenever the snow begins again, the four raptors can snuggle in the bark bedding that the segnosaur had gathered.

Raptor Red is aware that her sister walks with a limp. The wound has scabbed over, but Raptor Red can see that it still causes pain. Her sister refuses to stay in the cave to let the wound heal and insists on going on every hunt.