In the foreground a herd of vast anatotitans was crossing the floodplain. It was a convoy of flesh. These immense creatures looked oddly unbalanced, with powerful hind legs — each of them taller than an adult human — but comparatively spindly forelegs, and they trailed long, fat conical tails. The air was filled with their rumbles: the churning of the herbivores’ huge stomachs and the deeper growl of their voices, reaching deep into the infrasonic, deeper than any human ear could have detected, as they called reassurance to each other.
The anatotitans converged on a grove of cycads. The cycads’ mature leaves were thick and spiny, but their fresh growth, protected by a crown of older leaves, was green and luscious. So the anatotitans rose up on their heavy hind legs and cropped the new growth. As their great feet fell back on the undergrowth of ferns, clouds of insects rose up. The phalanx of titans would leave the cycads smashed and broken. Though the anatotitans would scatter seeds for future growth far from here, the vegetation would take a long time to recover from the devastation they caused.
There was noise everywhere: the mighty foghorn honks of the duckbills, the bellows of the armored dinosaurs, the screeching of birds, the leathery flapping of the huge flocks of pterosaurs. And, under it all, there was the ugly, unstructured roar of a female tyrannosaur, the area’s top predator: All of these animals were within her domain, and she was letting them, and any competitor tyrannosaur, know about it.
The scene might have reminded a human of Africa. But though there were great herbivores to fill the roles of antelopes, elephants, hippos, and wildebeests, and predators who hunted like lions, cheetahs, and hyenas, these animals were more closely related to birds than to any mammal. They preened, displayed, fought, and nested with oddly rapid motions fueled by the rich oxygen of the thick air. The smaller, more lithe dinosaurs that ran or stalked through the undergrowth would have seemed surreaclass="underline" There was nothing like these bipedal runners in human times. And there was no sight in twenty-first century Africa like the two ankylosaurs who now began to mate, backing their rear ends together with the most exquisite care.
It was a landscape of giants, in which Purga was a lost, helpless figure, utterly irrelevant. But to the west, Purga made out a storey of denser forest, layer on layer of it rising up toward the distant volcanoes.
Purga had run the wrong way, coming to this place of the sea. She was a creature of the forest and the dirt; that was where she must go. But to get there she had to cross the open plain — and evade all those mountainous feet. With trepidation she slid down the sand bank.
But now she glimpsed stealthy movement through low ferns. She hurried beneath an immature araucaria and flattened herself against the ground.
A raptor. Standing as still as a rock, it was studying the jostling anatotitans. It was a deinonychus, something like a featherless, flightless bird. But it was as still as a crocodile. The raptor had only a faint scent — its skin was not as glandular as mammals’ — but there was a dry pungency in the air, a spiciness that filled Purga with a sense of peril.
It was very close to Purga. If it caught Purga the raptor would, of course, kill her in a second.
A bird was climbing into the tree above her. Its feathers were bright blue and it had claws on its wing bones and teeth in its beak. This creature was a relic of ancient times, of archaic linkages between birds, crocodiles, dinosaurs. The bird was climbing to feed its brood of fat, squawking chicks. Apparently it had not seen the raptor.
But for now the raptor was stalking larger prey.
The raptor watched the anatotitan herd with blank, hawklike eyes, its only calculation was which of the titanic herbivores might serve it as Prey. If necessary, it would harass the herd, seeking to make one of them peel away and thereby become vulnerable.
But that proved unnecessary.
One of the adult titans fell behind the rest. This female, walking tiredly, was more than seventy years old. Her growth had continued all her life, and now she was the largest in the herd — one of the largest of her kind anywhere, in fact. Now she dipped a heavy head into the scummy water of a shallow pond.
The raptor began to stalk steadily, silently, toward the old titan. Purga cowered in the shelter of her araucaria.
The raptor was three meters tall — compact, agile, with slim legs capable of high-speed running and a long stiff tail for balance. It had a huge claw on each hind limb; while the raptor walked, its toes lifted the claws up and clear of the ground.
The raptor wasn’t so smart. Its brain was small — no larger than a chicken’s or a guinea fowl’s. And it was a solitary hunter; it wasn’t smart enough to hunt in a pack. But it didn’t need to be.
The great anatotitan still had no idea of the danger it was in.
The raptor erupted from cover. It spun in the air, and its grime-crusted hind claws flashed cruelly. The strikes were made well.
Blood gushed. Bellowing, the anatotitan tried to back away from the water. But the titan’s black entrails slid out of immense, deep belly wounds, steaming. At last she caught her forefeet in the slippery mess. With a sound like thunder she slid forward on her chest. And then, with a spasm, the great hind legs collapsed, rolling the great bulk of her body onto its side.
One of the other anatotitans looked back and lowed mournfully, a deep noise that made the ground under Purga tremble. But the herd was already moving on.
The raptor, panting rapidly, waited for the titan to weaken.
The dinosaurs had first emerged more than a hundred and fifty million years ago, in a time of hot dry climates more welcoming to reptiles than mammals. In those days the continents were fused into the single vast Pangaean landmass, and the dinosaurs had been able to spread across the planet. Since then, continents had fissioned, danced, and whirled, and bands of climate had shifted across the planet. And the dinosaurs had evolved in response.
Dinosaurs were different.
They did not hunt like the mammalian killers of later times. Their cold blood meant they were poor at sustaining speed for long distances; they could never be endurance hunters, running down their prey like wolves. But they had versatile, high-pressure hearts. And the design of their bodies had much in common with birds’: This raptor’s neck bones and torso contained a duct system that drew the air through its lungs, and oxygen could be supplied to its tissues at a tremendous rate. It was capable of short sprints, and could pour a great deal of energy into its attacks.
Dinosaur hunts were events of stillness, of ambush and silence and motionlessness, broken by brief bursts of savage violence.
Mammals were not poorly evolved compared to the dinosaurs. The product of her own track of tens of millions of years of evolution, Purga was exquisitely adapted for the niche in which she made her living. But the brutal facts of energy economics kept mammals caged in the neglected corners of a dinosaur world. Overall, a dinosaur killer made better use of energy than mammals: This raptor could run like a gazelle but it rested like a lizard. It was that combination of energy efficiency and lethal effectiveness that had kept the dinosaurs supreme for so long.
The raptor was something like a huge, ferocious bird, perhaps. Or something like a souped-up crocodile. But it was not truly like those animals. It was like nothing seen on Earth in human times, something no human eye would ever witness.