It was a dinosaur.
This raptor’s preferred way of killing was to burst out of cover and slash at its prey, inflicting wounds that were savage but often nonlethal. The prey might flee, but it would be weakened by raking wounds to its legs and flanks — or hamstringing — blood loss and shock would result. The raptor had poor dental hygiene — its breath stank ferociously — and its bite passed on a mouthful of bacteria. The raptor would follow, perhaps attacking again, perhaps just following the scent of the stinking, infected wounds, until weakness disabled the prey.
Today this raptor had been lucky; it had disabled its victim with a single blow. All it had to do now was wait until the titan was too weak to do the raptor any harm. It could even take its food while its prey was still alive.
The raptor would not trouble with such small fry as Purga while such a giant meal awaited it. Moving cautiously, watchfully, Purga left the shelter of the fern, and scurried across the scrubby floodplain, through the devastated track left by the anatotitan herd, until she reached the security of the trees.
For the first time in four billion years, heat had touched the Devil’s Tail. Fragile ice sculptures older than Earth were quickly lost.
Gases boiled through fissures in the crust. Soon a shining cloud of dust and gas the size of the Moon had gathered around the comet. The wind from the sun, of light and sleeting particles, made the gas and dust stream behind the falling comet nucleus in tails millions of kilometers long. The twin tails were extremely tenuous, but they caught the light and began to shine.
For the first time, uncomprehending eyes on Earth made out the approaching comet.
Spitting, rotating, its dark nucleus founting gases with ever greater vigor, the Devil’s Tail swam on.
III
Another long, hot Cretaceous day wore away.
Purga slept through the day, her new family curled around her. She slept even when her pups suckled. The snug burrow floor was littered with the primates’ soft fur — and it smelled, indubitably, of Purga, of her new mate, and of the three pups who were half of herself.
Purga’s mate gave himself no name, and nor did Purga name him, any more than she named herself. But if she had — in recognition that he could never be the first in her life — she might have called him Second.
As Purga slept, she dreamed. Primates already had brains large and complex enough to require self-referential cleansing. So she dreamed of warmth and darkness, of flashing claws and teeth, and of her own mother, huge in her memory.
Purga, like all mammals, was hot-blooded.
All animal metabolisms were based on the slow cellular burning of food in oxygen. The first animals to colonize the land — gasping fish, driven from drying rivulets, using swim bladders as crude lungs — had had to rely on metabolic engines designed for swimming. In those first land-walkers the metabolic fires had glowed dimly. Still, their decisive move onto the land had been successful; and now and into the future every animal — mammals, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and birds, even snakes and whales — would use a variant of the same ancient tetrapod body plan of four legs, a backbone, ribs, fingers, and toes.
But some two hundred million years before Purga’s birth, certain animals had begun to develop a new kind of metabolism. They had been predators, driven by selection to burn food more briskly in order to improve their luck in the chase.
It had meant a complete redesign. These ambitious predators needed more food, a higher rate of digestion, a more efficient system of waste elimination. All this had raised their metabolic rate, even when resting, and they had had to increase the size of heat-producing organs like the heart, kidneys, liver, and brain. Even the working of their cells had speeded up. In the end a new and stable high body temperature had been set.
The new hot-blooded bodies had had an unplanned advantage. Cold-bloods relied on drawing heat from the environment. But the hot-bloods did not. They could operate at peak efficiency in the cool of night, when the cold-bloods had to rest, or in extreme heat, when cold-bloods would have to hide. They could even prey on cold-bloods — frogs, small reptiles, insects — at times like dawn and dusk, when those slow movers were vulnerable.
But they could not topple the dinosaurs from their thrones; the dinosaurs’ supreme energy efficiency saw to that.
Purga’s dreams were disturbed by the immense stomping of the dinosaurs as they went about their incomprehensible activities in the world of day above. The ground would shake as if in an earthquake, and bits of the burrow walls crumbled and fell around the dozing family. It was as if the world was full of walking skyscrapers.
But there was nothing to be done about any of that. To Purga the dinosaurs were a force of nature, as beyond her control as the weather. In this huge, dangerous world, the burrow was home. The thick earth protected the primates from the heat of the day, and sheltered the still-naked pups from the night’s chilclass="underline" The earth itself was Purga’s shelter against dinosaur weather.
And yet, at the back of her small mind, there was a tiny chapel of memory, a reminder that this was not her first home, not her first family — a lingering warning that she could lose all this, too, in another instant of light and flashing claws and teeth.
When the Earth turned and the air cooled and the dinosaurs settled into their nightly torpor, at their feet the dirt stirred. The creatures of the night emerged: insects, amphibians — and many, many burrowing mammals, rising like a tide of miniature life around the dinosaurs’ pillarlike legs.
This night Purga and her new mate traveled together. Purga, a little older and more experienced, led the way. A few centimeters apart, proceeding in cautious fits and starts, they made their way down the shallow slope toward the lake.
They did not usually forage together. But the weather had been dry, and the priority for both of them was to get a drink.
This part of America had endured a long, epochal drying. Here the relic of the ancient inland sea was a great stretch of swampy land, drowned by new sediment from the Rockies to the west, young mountains eroding almost as quickly as they were born. And in this time of relative drought, any standing water was a focus for animals large and small.
And so the lakeshore was crowded with dinosaurs.
Here was a herd of triceratops, three-horned giants with huge bony frills that covered their shoulder regions. They were like heavily armed rhinos, dozing in their loose circles, the adults’ ferocious horns pointing outward to deter any hungry, night-prowling aggressor.
There were many duck-billed hadrosaurs. Herds had gathered around this shallow lake, a bewildering, brightly colored array of them, and Purga and Second had to creep past forests of their great, immobile legs, like refugees in an immense sculpture park. Even now, as the duckbills slumbered, their unconscious snoring was a cacophony of deep and mournful hoots, honks, and cries; they sounded like fogbound ships.
At last Purga and Second reached the edge of the lake. The water had receded, and they had to cross a stretch of stony, half-dried pond-bottom mud, slick with mucus and sheets of green vegetation. In the eerie, still light, Purga drank quickly, her eyes wide and whiskers twitching.
Their thirst sated, the primates split up. Second began to track over the shallow beach, looking for the little piles of coiled sand that marked the presence of a worm.
Purga moved up the beach to the fringe of the scrub, following a more intriguing smell.
She soon found the source of the stink: a fish. It was lying in a heap of rusty fern fronds, its carcass shriveled within its silvery skin. Somehow stranded far from the water, it had been dead many hours. When Purga poked the fish’s skin it burst, releasing a voluminous, noxious stench — and a squirming mass of ghost-pale maggots. Purga plunged her paws into the carcass. Soon she was pushing maggots into her mouth; the salty goodies burst between her teeth, releasing delicious body juices.