Robert Bakker - RAPTOR RED

He raises his head, pauses, then lowers his jaws, picks up the meat, and starts an encore performance.

The white dactyl visits every day for two weeks. The pickings are good - the pack hunts segnosaurs in and around the caves, and easy meat is so plentiful that the dactyl is allowed to help himself to nice pink flesh and innards too.

Both the male and the older chick hunt, but not together. The older chick acts more and more like an aggressive adult, and she won’t let the male get close.

Every day Raptor Red gets stronger. For a while she doesn’t even try to join the hunts - she knows she doesn’t have to. The courtship-bonding dance is repeated every morning and assures her that the male will provide.

On the fifteenth day Raptor Red is getting uncontrollably restless. She walks around the temporary nest the pack has built from conifer branches. She tests her injured leg - it’s up to eighty percent efficiency. She bites and claws at young trees, gnawing deep grooves in the bark.

She wants to get back to her role of active predator. She enjoys searching for prey-sign. She enjoys stalking. And she gets pleasure from making a kill.

She stands tall, sniffing the air. She sees the white dactyl poking his beak into a muddy pond. Raptor

Red lowers her body, and slinks toward the winged old-timer. She crawls to within twenty feet.

The old dactyl stops poking bubbles. Raptor Red leaps forward,. making as loud a noise as she can.

The dactyl jumps up and away and is airborne. He’s pissed off. Adult raptors acting like chicks - this is wrong! he thinks as he flaps away, mumbling to himself.

Raptor Red turns, looks all around, and sniffs the scent-trail left by her mate. She’s vaguely aware that her own rambunctious mood isn’t just because she’s nearly healed. It’s also because it’s spring.

The sunlight floods over their bodies and heads, making Raptor Red feel bouncy and playful. The days have been getting longer, and inside her brain Raptor Red unconsciously is using daylight length to mark her life’s calendar. The window of opportunity for breeding is about to be announced.

This year, she’s not afraid.

Here on the mountainside there are no acros. Prey is superabundant. And Raptor Red and her young male consort have proved to be very efficient hunters - when they work together.

Raptor Red whumps her consort very hard with her snout. She begins to understand the message of the sun - soon, very soon, it will be time to reproduce. He looks up, confused. His bioclock is a few days behind hers.

Four days later, a profusion of yellow and pink flowers explodes over the mountain shrubbery. Raptor Red and her mate spend a leisurely afternoon poking and chewing and pulling up the flowers. Every ten minutes or so she bumps him hard on the rump with her forehead.

Raptor Red notes that this day is marked by other changes. The white dactyl has stopped coming around, but to compensate there are new neighbors. The mob of tiny tro-odonts, the little fellows with inquisitive faces who like to slide, take up residence and sneak in to bite carrion beetles and steal tiny carcass scraps.

Raptor Red continues her sister’s tradition of welcoming the playful scavengers. The tro-odonts in return squawk loud warnings anytime a large dinosaur approaches. And they provide playmates for the younger chick. Raptor Red and her mate move the pack to the inside of the segnosaur cave, and the tro-odonts camp outside.

Two days later Raptor Red feels too lively to stay at the cave, and she rejoins her pack on the hunt. They return at midday to hear an unholy racket near the nest-cave - two dozen tro-odonts are bouncing around beside themselves, hissing and screeching at a group of predaceous invaders. Raptor Red advances very carefully. There near the cave she sees a pack of Utahmptors, all young adults.

Raptor Red lies down and stays out of sight. She doesn’t know what the strangers are up to. Her consort joins her. The strangers are uneasy. They walk slowly around the cave entrance, sniffing and depositing scent-markers.

Raptor Red’s older niece comes up behind her but refuses to lie down. Instead she does exactly what her mother would have done - she advances straight toward the strange Utahraptors, head down, teeth bared. Raptor Red moves her muzzle between two bushes so she can watch what’s happening.

As her niece strides into the clearing in front of the cave, five of the strangers retreat. One stands its ground. The niece walks up to the muzzle of the stranger and bobs her head once, twice, three times. He responds.

Courtship dance. Raptor Red identifies the movements. Then the pheromone detectors in her muzzle give the message: Sexually active male.

The duet is one-sided - the female chick makes far more grandiose bows and jumps and arm gestures. Raptor Red can see that the strange male is scared at first, but then he begins to respond. The dueting young couple moves in wide circles that lead them farther and farther away from the nest.

Raptor Red sits up, resting her body on her pelvis. She sighs. An immensely heavy weight seems to dissolve away. The burden of raising this chick to adulthood is finally lifted.

The older chick and her lover move down a gully and disappear from Raptor Red’s view. The chick does not look back. Raptor Red gets up and investigates the abandoned dance floor. There’s a small dung-pile left by the male stranger, and Raptor Red sniffs it thoroughly. In the future she will respond to this male as if he were family.

Raptor Red scans the area - she can see another strange Utahraptor far away, sitting on a boulder, making no aggressive moves but just staring back at the cave.

Her own mate joins her and he finds something her nose missed - a tiny dung-marker plastered against a tree, sixty yards from the cave. Raptor Red sees her mate lingering with great interest here.

The pheromone alarm goes off again in Raptor Red’s brain: Sexually active female! She watches her mate’s nostrils as they flare, sniffing the still air. The strange raptor sitting on the boulder stands up and makes a graceful head gesture.

SkkkkkrrrrrAWK!

Raptor Red emits a fierce threat and raises her muscular arms. She snaps her huge, sharp hand claws up and down as she advances with long strides toward the strange female.

Raptor Red’s mate looks at the stranger, then back to Raptor Red. No contest would be a translation of what he’s thinking. My mate is the most beautiful raptor in the world.

He adds his voice to Raptor Red’s threat. The strange female lowers her body in a submissive gesture and slinks away.

Raptor Red looks back at her mate. He’s bobbing his head and making short mock-charges. He bumps her rump with his forehead. Raptor Red feels a flood of emotions - aggression, joy, anger, relief. It’s exactly one year since she lost her first male consort in the lowland mud of Utah.

Raptor Red is bumped by her mate. The two Utahraptor lovers make a slow dance around each other. Raptor Red makes submissive motions with her head and neck. The male replies with the identical bows and head-bobs. He mounts her once, but she shakes him off. He dances and bows again, attempts to mount, and again Raptor Red shakes him off - but this time more gently.

On the third try, Raptor Red lets the male mount her unhindered.

In early summer the great white dactyl returns to the skies over Raptor Red and her family, making low spirals to catch up on what’s happened in the last several months. He looks down and can’t believe what he sees. He swoops down closer. He’s very surprised - and happy.

An unruly mob of Utahraptors is sliding down a slick mud slope. Adults scramble awkwardly up the incline. Little chicks dart in serpentine pathways past their elders. Everyone is coated with red muck.