Half of the raptors were swimming through the water toward the long-necked dinos, but the other half were on the shore and seemed to be angling around to get on the other side. I guessed this was to keep the brontos from trying to get back on the shore easily, but I wasn’t quite sure.
“The larger one is--” Sheela started to say, but her words were interrupted by what sounded like a cannon blast going off. The male brontosaurus had flicked his massive tail around like a whip, and one of the swimming raptors evaporated into a puff of red mist.
The female emulated her mate’s movement with her tail, and the first raptor that had latched on was launched into the trees of the jungle some two hundred yards away. There were four others to take his place though, and I saw their front arm claws hook into her legs like ice climbing axes. The female tried to stomp them off, but the water was making her movements slow, and the raptors brought their foot claws into play. They raked their feet against her legs and both brontos let out frustrated screams.
The male swung his head down low across the female’s feet and knocked two of the raptors off, but a new group was now attaching to his legs, and he began to move like a bucking horse. The raptors wouldn’t come free though, and that whole side of the turquoise lake began to turn dark red with gallons of brontosaurus blood.
The female flicked her tail again, and she killed one of the raptors on the shore, it wasn’t one of the fuckers digging into her leg though, and she let out another screech of agony.
The male bronto tried to swipe his head across his mate’s legs again, but another group of raptors had swam to the spot, and two of them jumped out of the water and caught onto his face when he brought it lower. They stuck like spider-monkeys, and the male thrashed his head around violently in an attempt to dislodge them. One of the raptors flew off, but it looked like he took one of the bronto’s eyeballs out, and the larger dino’s face leaked out gallons of blood. It fell from his skull like a waterfall, and it sprayed across the lake like a sprinkler when he shook his head.
The battle was horrific, and I shook my aching head to bring myself back to what really mattered: getting the fuck out of here as soon as we could.
“Let’s go,” I said as I commanded the team of dinos to race away from our side of the lake. I doubted that these new larger raptors cared about us since the two brontos would probably feed them for a bit, but it was obvious that this pack was way more dangerous than the group of carnos I’d just killed.
These raptors were going to finish eating those brontos, and then they were going to need more to consume. Unfortunately, our camp was only three-ish miles from the lake, and we had seven rotting carnotaurus bodies near us.
We needed our new walls built yesterday.
I led our dinos into the jungle first and then pushed them up the hill. The path was a bit longer than I would have liked, but I didn’t want to risk the raptors seeing us going up the open hill. We were soon cresting the slope that led into our valley, and I directed our caravan of dinos down along the river until we reached the spot where the massive rotting tree was overturned.
“This is where we normally get water when we don’t need clay,” I explained to Trel after we had arrived.
“And our fort is that way?” she asked as she pointed into the trees.
“Yeah,” I confirmed.
“Does it go uphill, or downhill or…?”
“It varies,” Sheela said. “I would say that our fort is actually at a higher elevation.”
“Hmmm,” Trel said as she looked at the river, the shore, and the closest trees.
“Let’s get the jugs filled,” I said as I commanded Bob to sit on the shore.
All the other dinos had filled up on water at the lake, but I set Tom, Nicole, and Katie to guard us against anything that might come at us from the trees. I doubted the larger raptors saw us, but I wanted to be careful. There were no second chances in Dinosaurland.
Sheela, Kacerie and I filled up the water while Trel surveyed the river and shore. We had six jugs to fill, but it only took a half a minute with the three of us.
“You just take it from the river?” Trel asked, and I saw her blink her eyes to use her Eye-Q.
“Yeah,” I replied. “We try to go as deep as we can, but it’s just like the lake.”
“The lake is even worse. We are lucky that no one has gotten sick. I haven’t been paying attention to our water issue. Ugh.”
“I know,” I said. “But this is the best we can do.”
“I can make a filter. Maybe something that has three or four stages.” Trel bit her lip and nodded her head as she thought about the problem. “We can get rocks, sand, finer sand, and I’ll make a funnel with clay that will be mounted on a tripod pedestal. We can pour it into the top of the funnel and then the water will drip down into a secondary jug. Then we can take that jug of water and pour it into a system of finer sand and gravel. It should get rid of most of the pathogens and viruses.”
“When I first got here, I worried that I couldn’t drink anything without boiling it.”
“Hmmm,” Trel mused. “I don’t think we’ll have to do that. I need to play around with the clay, but I should be able to make an ultra-fine filter with the material. It can have pores so small that only water molecules can fit through. It will take a long time to filter, but I can make a tank with a lid on top of it. Then we can pour the second stage water into the vat and drink that water when it slowly drips into a final tank.
“Add this to the list after building the fort,” I sighed.
“We have been lucky so far,” Trel said with a sigh. “All it takes is an animal shitting upstream a few minutes before you gather water, and we will all become sick.”
“Good point,” I said.
“We should have some clay left over after we start the fires in the logs,” Trel continued. “I’ll play around with some funnel designs. It won’t take that much time, even if we just get the first two stages of filters working in the next few days, it will be much safer. If we want to grow our tribe, we’ll have to be able to provide clean water consistently.”
“Yeah, I agree,” I said. “And that’s also why we need the aqueduct. What do you think? Can you build one?”
“I know how to build a pump that will use the momentum of the river to push water uphill,” she said as she gestured up to the trees. “My first thought is to have the pipes go up into the trees and then flow through the canopy to us. The advantage would be that it will be harder for dinosaurs to break, but the disadvantage is that the wind twists the branches, and we might have pipes break. I think the best option would be to make pipes and bury them deep in the ground.”
“So a mile of pipes?” Kacerie said. “That sounds like a lot of work. We’d make them out of clay?”
“Yeah,” Trel said with a shrug. “I’d have to figure out how to craft some sort of template, and we would have to figure out a way to join each pipe piece together. I’ll need some sort of glue, or each piece will need to be finely crafted so that they fit together snugly. I’ll also have to create check valves so we can inspect the line.”
“Check valves?” I asked with concern. This was beginning to sound really complicated, but I was the one that wanted the work done.
“Yeah,” Trel huffed. “Let’s say we lay a mile of the clay pipe, and for some reason, the water stops coming. I won’t know where the issue is, so we’ll have to either find a spot on the ground that is flooded with water, or we’ll have to dig up the full mile again. If I put a check valve every hundred or so feet, I can just open it and see if water comes out. If it does, then I know the break happened closer to our fort, and I can save a lot of time repairing.”