Survival of the Fittest
A Raptor Red fan fiction
Disclaimer: This story is based upon the novel Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker. It is set roughly three years before Red opens, as Red and her family are trekking across the land bridge from Asia to America. I've taken the liberty of updating his raptors with feathery coats. For those of you unfamiliar with the book, the time is the Early Cretaceous period. Red is a young female Utahraptor migrating from her species' ancestral lands in a worldwide biogeographical shakeup involving several continents. Conditions are necessarily unsettled, and predators (as Bakker explains) "are traveling much more than they would in a normal season." We have to take his word for it, since it's his book...
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CHAPTER 1: Nightfall
Raptor Red looked curiously as the snow began to fall. Her father and mother, with the two chicks reamining after her sister left, were back in the temporary nest they had built among jumbled boulders at the base of the hillside. Sequoia forest rose giant and silent along the slopes, shading out ground-hugging vegetation and leaving the forest the open terrain her species liked.
The snow started lazily at first, twisting and drifting slowly downwards through gaps in the sequoia foliage. At first she thought the trees were releasing seedpods, as she had seen desert plants do every season of her five years. The snowflakes drifted down until they lighted on the keratinous feathers along her back. That's cold! she snorted to herself, the snowflake dissolving into a trickle of frigid water seeping into her down. She shook herself, but more flakes settled in, making her shiver.
Through the trees she looked southward, seeing across open lowlands dotted with meadows, snaking rivers glinting yellow in the low-angle sun. She hopped atop a boulder and sat watching the sun sink lower, raising the crest at the nape of her neck as if puzzled. The days are so short here. There's only enough light to hunt two hours of the day. In her homeland, the sun burned fiercely high in the sky, colored by duststorms sweeping across its face. Here it barely gave enough heat to keep the rivers from freezing over.
Dark gray clouds expanded eastward, and in the north the horizon was the deep blue of dusk. The snow started sleeting harder. The wind picked up, roaring through the sequoia boughs like a torrent. Red squinted against the sleet, cold grainy pellets bouncing off the hide of her face and eyelids.
"Rruuk, rrruuk." Her head perked up at her mother's voice. She gave a short reply, and turned on the boulder to look back toward the nest.
Her mother was watching her, camouflaged well against the red bark of the giant conifers. Red snorted. Hopping off her boulder, she loped back to her mother, bumping snouts with her and glancing inquisitively into her eyes. Something in her mother's expression made Red's heart sink. No meat today, either.
The wind had been getting colder during the pack's stay in the new nest, the days shorter. Vast herds of game - iguanodons, astrodons, unfamiliar thick-bodied herbivores with domed skulls and nasty demeanors - had been gathering and moving southward. Red and her family had been moving north. There seemed to be only one thing to do: follow the game south. Her sister had gone south, after pairing with her new mate.
Red trudged back up the slope, her evaporated expectation of a full belly making her abruptly weary. She glanced back at her mother and made a chirpy call, but her mother had hopped atop the boulder and now was gazing vacantly southeast. Red didn't like the looks of the east. The growing clouds shadowed the land, making it look like the edge of coherent reality. Or a place well beyond it. Her mother seemed not to notice the gathering storm, staring out over the plains at something Red had missed. Is she watching a herd? Red wondered. She stalked back to the rock, jumping up beside her mother, who glanced at her only a moment.
Red followed her mother's gaze. She could make out an extensive rising slope, open and empty of trees. A small flock of fast-winged pterosaurs darted and circled over the ridge, alighting into trees at the edge of the clearing, darting out again. Surely she doesn't think we can hunt those? she thought hesitantly. Her mother's behavior was confusing her; normally her mother was a strict tactician not given to wasting time on impossible quarries. Her father was more loopy, almost playful in the way he went after game. Her father had stalked and snapped at ornithodesmus nesting in low trees near their old territory, while her mother had looked on with something of a scowl in her eyes.
Maybe she's watching the storm, Red decided. She cooed softly, nudging her mother with her snout. If the storm was going to be as bad as it looked, they needed to get back to the nest.
The snow changed into sleet. Their feathers were good at repelling moisture, but the wind lanced the cold deep. Her mother bowed her head against the wind and growled, but she still gazed fixedly at whatever held her attention. Raptor Red was puzzled; she already knew the storm was going to be bad. What did her mother need to know? Red leapt off their perch and huddled in its lee, watching the forest shiver.
Suddenly her mother gave a quiet croaking call. Red looked up; she was looking down at her, bobbing her shoulders. That meant she had seen something to hunt.
*****
The two of them loped lightly through the forest as the darkness grew denser and the wind howled above. It was a bad time to hunt, certainly the worst conditions Red could remember being out in. She knew her parents had hunted in a storm like this many days before, just before making their current nest. Red had not been on that hunt, and she felt powerless and shying in the deepening gloom.
No time to get father, Red realized. Whatever her mother had seen wouldn't laze until the pack's two most experienced hunters had a chance to team up against it. Not knowing what they were stalking made Red nervous. She knew pterosaurs often circled over carrion, but the dactyls on the ridge seemed to follow a different behavioral pattern. Maybe they were fighting the wind. Red bounded abreast of her mother, meeting her eye. Red had a hard time picking out colors in the dark of the forest, but her mother's eye was still a vivid gold. It contracted and shot away from hers, locking onto something ahead. Both raptors ducked behind a brake of seedlings to watch.
Red sniffed deeply, trying to skein out scents from the frigid wind. At first she only caught the musty odor of the bonehead herbivores, prey almost impossible to kill in their bandying herds. The scent was not recent, at least several hours old.
But then she detected something else, the scent of... a male utahraptor! Involuntarily she perked her head up, looking over the seedlings. Her mother admonished her with a growl. Red spotted nothing between the obscenely huge boles. The sleet hissed unevenly into the ground. She shook her face clear of coagulating water and crouched low again. She searched for the scent again, and found it; it was fresh, and apparently left by a lone raptor...
It was several months before the start of the breeding season. Red had been bodily mature the last two years, but had shied away from suitors. Her complex predatory mind had not yet been fully forged, her skills were still in development. Her sister had been of the same brood, and she had taken a mate this season. Red herself was beginning to be more aware of the seasonal signals, to pay more interest to the sign left by willing males. This coming spring her mind and body would be flooded by hormones with one imperative demand: Get a mate! Make a nest! Hatch young! It was a strange time in any young raptor's life, and often Red didn't know how to handle it.
She almost forgot about their need to kill until her mother gave a gruff play-bite to her shoulder. Raptor Red followed passively as her mother trotted into a dry streamcourse, then led her upstream across riparian gravel and boulders. It was becoming full night now, and Red had problems finding her footing. Her dinosaurian ankles turned along one plane only - front to back - so she couldn't pivot or balance as well as a mammal could. Her stiff horizontal tail, flexible and muscular at the base, helped somewhat. Red had practice navigating streambeds, so it really wasn't that difficult for her. She noticed more markings from the young male on the ferns and bushes crowding the banks.
"Dwwooo-oooo... dwwoo-ooooo..."
Both raptors froze at the call. To Red it sounded like a theropod courting call, but her mother had a different reaction; her head cocked to the side, and she listened with eyes betraying predatory analysis. Red darted her eyes in search of any identifiable landmark of the forest, saw only the great silent trunks with their foliage roaring high above. Tiny cones and clumps of needles spun down and burrowed into her plumage. Sleet collected into rivulets between the boulders of the banks and entered the main channel. Through a gap in the trees she glimpsed a final clawtip of daylight before clouds and dark closed in together.
She did not know it would be the last daylight she would see for many strange months.
*****
They clambered out of the streambed up a fallen trunk. The sleet came in gusts, blowing harder one moment, whispering off the next. Raptor Red soon learned the rythm of moving through the darkened forest: letting her eyes take in the silhouettes of objects, walking slow enough to react, slow enough to place her feet carefully among the dead ferns, making as little sound as possible. Her mother was more skilled, and soon Red caught only occasional glimpses of her between the trunks ahead.
Again she heard the cries: "DWWOOooohh... dwoooHOOOOOoooo..." She raised her snout to test the wind. Her mother had brought them around to the downwind flank of whatever group of animals this was. She classified the olfactory data only vaguely: resembling iguanodon, but with a peculiar acrid afterodor she couldn't place. She hated to be in the dark, after unknown prey. Her mother hunted with assurance. Had she encountered this prey before, or was she only propelled by hunger?
FFFFFFKKWWWAKK! She ducked as if struck, and listened with a pounding heart to the echoes cracking among the trees. What was THAT? she thought, sniffing rapidly. Still the not-iguanodon odor... but also a new note, that of the young male raptor, also downwind of the not-iguanodons and to her left, towards the streambed.
FFFFFKKWWWAKK! FFFFFFFFSSSKAAKKKK! The sound multiplied, coming from three sources, four sources, invisible through the darkness. FFFFKKAAKK! It was like a tree-branch cracking and falling... only nothing ever hit the ground. As she lurked in a puddle of shadow, she began to hear chuffing noises, the crunch and lurch of moving bodies. Heavy bodies. Bigger than me, she decided. Feeling desperately alone, she started after her mother, following the weak scent trail in the frigid muddy ground. She was soaked and losing heat rapidly; her shivering was making it hard to concentrate, to follow a course. Soon she lost track of her mother's trail, and wandered goallessly around the perimeter of the strange herbivores' lair.
KKRRRRAKKKK! A particularly sharp report snapped her neck erect. The sleet strking the matted bracken made a sound like a thousand iguandonts on the move, disorienting her. The wind had stopped. She had no idea which way to go. The ground seemed to slope down ahead of her -- going back into the streambed? Indecidedly, she turned back, straining to see through the dark corridors of forest.
She wended her way past the immense trunks, flicking her killing-claw in fear and frustration. She had never been so miserable in her life. Maybe if she could find her way back to the nest her mother would return after her, they could wait until daylight and go after other game...
"SSSKKRRRREEEET! SKKKRREEET!" Ornithodesmus suddenly tumbled in the air around her, screetching madly and buffeting her with their tiny wings. Raptor Red flinched back behind a trunk, but the dactyls swamred about her, screaming and raking her feathers with their claws. She snapped at them, snarling, but then she heard something moving -- crashing through the dead bracken -- coming toward her.