Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

That second is long enough. Raptor Red makes her move. Her long arms shoot out and grab the alpha male. Her right leg hooks his rib cage from underneath. With all her strength she kicks.

The deinonych leader feels his body being lifted completely off his feet and hurled five yards in the air. He hits the snow and slides on his backside, colliding with three of his packmates and coming to rest upside down against a tree. The other deinonychs scurry in all directions. Their leader gets to his feet and staggers away.

Raptor Red looks down at the confusion that she and the chick have caused. For an hour the deinonych pack moves around uneasily a quarter-mile away. Two large males approach the alpha male and dispute his position of leadership - his ignominious fall down the slope has lost him the respect of the rest of the pack. He backs away and retreats to the rear of the deinonych horde.

Raptor Red tries to hide the fact that her body has been thoroughly crippled by that last defensive kick. Her entire left side is immobilized by pain that shoots from hip to knee to ankle. She knows she cannot defend herself or her family anymore - but maybe she won’t have to. Maybe the deinonychs have lost heart.

The deinonych pack does make a disorganized retreat to beyond a treeline.

The older chick hops over to Raptor Red and gives a war-whoop of victory. Raptor Red feels like cheering herself, despite her pain. We did well - we defended our family - we did very well, she thinks.

Raptor Red drags herself to the temporary nest -she wants to share the victory with her sister.

Ooop-oop-oop. Raptor Red coos a happy greeting. Her sister doesn’t answer. Her eyes are wide open and still. Raptor Red sits quietly for ten minutes. Her sister’s chest doesn’t move, and her eyes don’t blink as heavy snowflakes pile up around the eye socket.

It takes several hours for Raptor Red to accept the reality of her sister’s death. Her left knee throbs terribly, but she doesn’t notice. What she does feel is a near total loss of energy, as if the wind has been knocked out of her lungs and she can’t inflate them again. Her sister was the one individual for whom Raptor Red would and did sacrifice her own well-being.

She looks around. She’s alone. The two chicks are gone, their lingering scent trail leading upslope, in the direction of the cave. Raptor Red is unable to move. For the first time in her life, there’s no spark inside, no motivation to struggle, to figure things out.

The snow blows in unpredictable gusts, and Raptor Red’s body begins to shake in convulsive bursts of muscle contraction. Shivering like this will exhaust her in a hour. And then, her metabolic reserves used up, she will freeze to death.

Raptor Red lays herself against her sister’s body. Its residual heat helps keep her warm for a few minutes longer. The cold has eased the pain in Raptor Red’s left knee. Gradually she loses feeling in her other limbs too.

And she doesn’t care.

A dull, heavy feeling of failure falls on her. She doesn’t review her life one memory frame at a time. But deep in her consciousness she is aware that she’s failed in the great tasks Nature gives each female Utahraptor. She lost her original mate before they reproduced. Then she lost another mate, still without producing chicks. And now she has lost her sister’s orphans.

Raptor Red has a deep sense that the chicks have little chance in this dangerous region by themselves. Even the older chick isn’t ready to survive on her own yet without an adult to help.

Raptor Red feels pain in her head. Her ears ache from the cold, and it hurts to breathe. She can still smell, though. She smells the pine trees and the segno bones. And now she smells the deinonych pack. They’re coming back.

Raptor Red no longer can judge the passage of time. An hour. A half day. She has no idea how long she has lain next to her sister. It’s night now, with weak light from a quarter moon. She’s drawn up her legs as tightly as she can, trying to minimize heat loss from her body. And she’s pressed her shoulders against her sister’s body, exploiting the residual warmth. But even that heat source is drained after a while.

Raptor Red’s mind is cloudy - her eyes are closed, almost frozen shut, but she sees bright, clear images that come and go in quick succession. These are the dreams that come before death.

She sees a mortally wounded Astrodon in bright afternoon sun. She sees the heavy body tilt and roll heavily on her mate. She tries to scream, but there’s no sound in her dream.

A brilliant pterodactyl swoops down from the sun. Its wings are so shiny that Raptor Red tries to squint. She wants to jump up and bite those blind-ingly white wings. But in her dreams she can’t move.

She hears the dactyl now, coming and going, and coming back again.

A crocodile breaks the surface of a pond, sending a slow motion shower of droplets high into the air. Each droplet glows, then transforms into a point of light.

Her sister’s image condenses in the center of the light, close enough to touch, then fades.

Scents come and go too - mixed in ways they never are in life. The smell of warm iguanodon meat makes Raptor Red feel safe and content. The smell of tick-birds close up, about to groom the raptor pack, is pleasant too. Even better is the smell of a warm cave, lined with bark made pungent by the nearby droppings from the two chicks and her sister.

She tries to move her body to get close to the chicks, but she can’t feel her legs.

A male raptor appears, a Utahraptor with wings. She calls to him, and he answers. It’s her young male.

Her pleasant reverie is broken by the smell of Deinonychus very close. She growls and thrashes her arms, not knowing whether the scent comes from real enemies or the dreamtime. She tries to open her eyes, but there’s only cold blackness out there. She lifts her snout and forces her eyelids up. Hate finally rouses her brain from sleep.

She sees the deinonychs now: twenty of them, their legs and torsos outlined by moonlight, showing no fear. Five are chewing on parts of the segnosaur carcass that Raptor Red piled near her sister. The other deinonychs are strolling around the edge of the nest, sniffing and marking the ground with their dung-sign.

Raptor Red tries to move her forepaws, but the deinonychs ignore her feeble threat. To them, she’s already as good as dead.

The deinonychs squabble over the segnosaur remains, having a tug of war over a leg bone.

Several deinonychs cautiously approach Raptor Red’s sister, sniffing and pawing at her body with their claws.

Raptor Red can’t keep her eyes open - it’s as if a heavy hand is pulling her eyelids down from inside her head, and she doesn’t want to resist. The sounds of the deinonych pack stamping the snow with their feet are all around, but the footsteps merge into each other and become a cacophonicous mass. The deinonychs are scent-marking the Utahraptor nest, declaring it to be their territory, and she hates their smell - it’s blocking all other scents.

The cold seeps upward through Raptor Red’s legs and body. She begins to welcome the numbness. There’s nothing to protect her from the wind where she lies, and each new gust spreads its anesthetizing effect further through her knees and torso and shoulders. A vague but profound feeling of defeat and resignation is taking hold of her spirit.

A series of unspoken thoughts and wishes play in her mind, making her body quieter and quieter. It doesn’t matter anymore… there’s nothing more 1 can do… I just want the hurt to go away. It’s a combination of physiological shock that dulls her bodily responses and a final acceptance of her failure. The failure to carry out her duty as protector of those who carry her genes.