Author's Comments: Like other people here, I was deeply impressed, blown away, and yes, touched deeply by King Kong when I saw it. However, one thing about the movie that I had a real problem with and frankly found disappointing was that it showed far too few of the creatures invented to populate Skull Island. This was because I had the fortune to receive and read The World of Kong before I saw the actual movie, and was looking forward to seeing many of them on screen, although I knew they wouldn't all be there. When even fewer creatures than I thought made their appearance, it was a major letdown. But to honor and make up for some of the "deleted" creatures, I've written this story to give them a place in the sun too, as well as to expand somewhat further on the lives of a few of the creatures that were shown on the screen. I've even added some unique smaller creatures of my own to this island time forgot. As for the story itself, it takes place during a single day on Skull Island, with each chapter focusing on the events of one animal's life during that period, and covers two or three species from each distinct ecosystem.
Disclaimer: As much as I wish that I could say otherwise, King Kong, Skull Island, the story, and its creatures are all the property of Peter Jackson, Universal Pictures, RKO Productions, and Weta Workshop. That should cover it.
November 1903, Skull Island.
30 years before the Denham Expedition, 40 years before destruction of island.
Chapter One.
Sunrise in the tropics is shockingly abrupt, with the crimson sun vaulting over the horizon "like thunder" as Kipling expressively put it. Sunup on Skull Island was no exception to the rule. Most of its inhabitants though, had no interest in its majesty and beauty. To them it meant nothing more than a changing of the guard, a time to sleep and rest if they were creatures of the night, and a new day of trying to sustain life while not being fed open for the diurnal ones on this island so packed with predators.
One of the first of the latter to be woken was a male Peracerdon, or Green Fisher-Dragon, as laymen would later call his kind. Opening his eyes, the 14-foot theropod yawned, showing a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth, and rolled to his feet. Stepping out of his loose nest of driftwood and dried seaweed, the Peracerdon walked out of the jagged cave he called home, casually leaping nine feet down to another ledge, then seven more feet to the ground itself.
His cave was in a rocky, jagged headland in one of the island's narrow northeastern bays, where a large stream flowed into the sea at the bay's head, supporting a fair-sized mangrove forest teeming with fish. In addition, the bay also featured a fair number of patchy coral reefs, and even two or three sand beaches due to its relative stability.
Although he could and did catch fish quite well in the powerful surf that lashed the cliffs and headlands, the Peracerdon preferred to stalk fish in the calmer waters himself, since it was easier to see them underwater and there were also more to be caught in these habitats. Before he headed up the beach however, there was something important that he had to do.
Going over to a worn log of driftwood a dozen yards from his cave, he lifted his snout and scent-marked it with his two throat glands, reaffirming the message that this was his sleeping den to other males. Like others of his kind, the Peracerdon didn't have a real territory that he defended, just a general home range where he fished and traveled. Indeed, he'd even tolerate another male fishing near him, as long as the stranger didn't get any closer thanthirtyfeet. A female, of course, could get as close as she liked, as long as she showed proper respect. A cave or crevice that was high enough, big enough, and of course stable enough to be a proper den though, was a precious commodity, one to be jealously guarded.
Instead of walking along the beach towards the stream delta right away, the Peracerdon decided to get himself a small breakfast right then and there, going out into the water where a small ridge of rock blocked some of the force of the waves, creating fairly clear conditions for fishing. Going out into the water until it was up to his thighs, the theropod wrapped his feet around the rocks, a special sort of ratcheting mechanism in his tendons keeping him locked in place.
He waited for fifteen minutes, scanning the water until a smallish red octopus came by. Striking with the accuracy of a heron, the Peracerdon impaled it on his teeth and bolted it down. Three minutes later, a small crab came by. It too, was crunched and consumed.
But these were ultimately just small snacks, hardly enough to satisfy the dinosaur. Leaving the surf behind, he continued up the beach until he came to a great rock ridge going out into the sea, and behind it he could smell urine and dung, while bawling and bleating sounds rung in his ears. A human being would likely have found the jagged, thirty-foot ridge a tough customer to tackle, but the Peracerdon found it about as difficult as climbing a steep set of stairs.
As he started to climb, he passed a Limusaur scraping mussels from a rock face with its bulldog-like jaws and crunching them up. The two did not bother each other.
Coming over the top, the Peracerdon saw what he'd been expecting, a colony of Skull Island fur seals. Descendants of a group of Australian fur seals that by chance had taken a wrong turn and decided to make the island their home, the open beaches gave Skull Island's seals comfortable places to breed, where they could see predators coming, and rock ramparts gave additional protection to some colonies. But not always.
Carefully leaping down the ridge, the Peracerdon's arrival sent the seals hysterically barking in alarm. As he slunk up to the colony, the cows grabbed their new pups by the nape, moving them out of the way or close to their sides where they could be better defended. As for the Peracerdon, although he was hungry, he also wasn't stupid. Fur seals were surprisingly fast on land, and a protective mother could give a deep, painful bite.
Instead, the theropod hunted unguarded pups, left alone and unprotected while their mothers were out fishing. Running right at a cluster of seals was one easy way to hunt them, and any pups that weren't defended or moved were fair game. He also used trickery to catch pups, lying down on the warm sand and striking a relaxed, nonchalant pose, as if meat was the last thing on his mind. Intensely curious, and also mistaking his dark form for an adult, pups would quickly approach him only to discover that this creature wasn't so benign after all.
Deciding to flop down and use the latter strategy, the Peracerdon was lowering himself to the sand when he heard a cow groaning and saw her go into a U-shape. She was just about to birth a pup, a perfect opportunity for the predator. He ran right for her, vaulting over and dodging other cows and pups as they frantically tried to get out of his way or drag offspring to safety. Seconds before he arrived, the cowgave birth toa female pup, turning to break the short umbilical cord and face the dinosaur at the same time.
Weak as she felt, the mother seal still rotated around on her fore flippers, trying to bite or at least parry away the Peracerdon as he danced around her, while the wet pup huddled in confusion against her flank. But the dinosaur saw a sudden opening, and with in one fast jab, lunged at the pup, grabbing what he wanted as the cow bawled out and the pup screamed. Avoiding a snap from the mother, he carried off the hard-earned delicacy and happily bolted it as the mother seal calmed down and gave her new daughter her first drink of milk. Thankfully for them, this time it was just the succulent afterbirth that he'd been after.
Still hungry, the Peracerdon went back over to the seals again, where he consumed another afterbirth and then found a dead pup on the sand, accidentally crushed the evening before when the harem bull chased and briefly fought a rival. Picking the little body up and holding it in his hands, he soon ensured that it didn't go to waste.
It was midmorning now, and still somewhat hungry, he decided to leave the fur seals to go catch fish in the mangroves around the head of the bay. As he continued walking, he stumbled across another male coming in the opposite direction, out to hunt seal pups himself.
Both males froze, and then cautiously approached each other. Realizing the other Peracerdon was also a male, he first yawned, displaying his sharp teeth and shutting his jaws with a hard snap in a mild threat. The other male did the same, and then began clacking his jaws while slowly waving his tail in a slightly more forceful display. The Peracerdon responded in kind, as both males still slunk towards each other, standing as tall as possible.
Then, with only ten feet between them and their eyes locked, the fisher-dragons suddenly agreed to disagree, relaxing and letting each other pass without incident. They'd never intended to fight anyway, just to remind the other that they were male and to be respected, preserving their dignity. If the encounter had involved a den or breeding female though, it would've been much more violent.
Reaching the edge of the mangrove swamp, he picked his way through the tangle of sand, mud, and roots, finding a nice sloping beach going into a channel. An Aciedactylus passing by saw him and instinctively started to show off her great bladelike hand claws, but then identified the intruder as harmless and continued on her way. Wading out, he chose a spot near an old Ligocristus skull, a feature sure to attract fish. Smaller fish soon began to return, but they were too spooked at first to come close. After twenty minutes though, a 9-inch long silver mono came with range. It was immediately caught and consumed, starting off the day's real fishing.
During the next three hours, occasionally moving to new sites, the Peracerdon caught himself a foot-long silver needlefish pursuing prey of its own, a pair of archerfish, a threadfin butterflyfish, a good-sized mud crab, a spotted scat, a bird wrasse, and in one channel a snapper so big that he had some trouble getting it down.
As the heat grew more intense, the Peracerdon grew hotter and uncomfortable himself. The tide was now rapidly coming in too, submerging the shallow sandbar where he'd been doing his latest bout of fishing. So, crop stuffed with seafood, he casually entered the deeper water and headed for higher ground. Kicking his partly webbed feet like a duck and lashing his muscular tail like a crocodile, he swam the 60-foot wide channel in no time, stepping out onto dry land and going over to the cool, pleasantly humid shade of a big mangrove, where he stretched out and spent the remainder of the afternoon resting and digesting his satiating meal of fish, watching the herons and ibises fishing and searching out prey themselves.
When the sun finally sunk lower in the sky and lost some of its ferocity, the theropod arose, shook himself, and began heading back to his sleeping cave. As he walked along the shore, feeling at ease and in good spirits, he decided to play a bit, picking up a medium-sized stick in his jaws and flipping it into the air over and over again, catching it each time. He held it in the side of his jaws and tugged at it with a hand, sometimes twitching the stick back and forth. Getting tired of that, he began putting it into a ghost crab burrow, reaching with his jaws to pull it out and repeating the process again.
On the seventh time he did this, he suddenly heard a crunch of gravel and then footfalls on the beach. Fast, heavy, and much too close. He immediately stood upright, whipping around to see a twenty-two foot female Tartarusaurus running right for him. With a gobbling bark of alarm, he immediately broke into a terrified run, tearing across the beach with the Tartarusaurus hard on his heels. Although she was a huge, ponderous-looking beast, he knew full well that she could cover a short distance with deceptively quick speed, and had good stamina to back her up besides, with immensely powerful jaws. And those jaws would be biting out his life very soon if he didn't find a way to outrun or outmaneuver her.
Fortunately for him though, he was also quite fast, with his two legs making him a much more efficient runner, and his lighter body giving him greater speed and agility. The Tartarusaurus was gaining on him, and he dodged sharply, getting out of her way as she plowed forward and putting more ground between the two of them. He couldn't slow down just yet though, and his pursuer continued to keep up.
In front of them and off to the left now was a great basalt pillar three stories near the edge where the jungle gave way to the coast, with a partial staircase carved into it by a former civilization. Putting on an extra burst of speed, the Peracerdon dodged the Tartarusaur again, and used that extra second of time to run right for the monolith, crossing the remainingseventy-five feet to leap up the partial stairway and then using his sharp, powerful hand and foot claws to climb the rest of the way.
Reaching the pillar herself, the Tartarusaurus immediately reared up to try to catch her escaping prey, and got so close that the Peracerdon felt her hot, moist breath on his tail for a few fearful moments. But he rapidly got to the pillar's top, where he then sat and looked down at the coast's most terrible predator while panting from fear and exhaustion.
The Tartarusaur gave a cavernous growl, and reared up on her hind legs again, trying to reach her meal that was so close yet so far away. But both reptiles knew how this was inevitably going to turn out, and after rearing up several more times just to make sure, the Tartarusaurus gave one last menacing growl, shook her head in irritation, and loped off down the beach to find a meal elsewhere.
It took a while for the Peracerdon's nerves to calm down. It took even longer to get up the courage to come down, in case the Tartarusaur had come back to ambush him. Cautiously, he walked further up the beach, skirting the broken and steep landward edge of the fur seal colony. He saw his would-be killer again much further away among some boulders and froze-but relaxed on seeing that she was eating a pair of seals that she'd just killed and so was no longer a danger to him.
Navigating the ever-increasing amounts of fractured rock on an ever-narrower beach, he returned to the cave where he slept as the bottom edge of the sun began to touch the horizon. He sniffed around for abouta hundredyards in each direction, and noted with pleasure that there was no trace of any other males. Walking up the beach some more, he stopped climbed up a slope of rocks, using the dim light as the best time to hunt seabirds returning from a day of fishing. Picking a space with a sloping ledge, he was able to leap to the right and grab a red-footed booby passing just four feet above, bringing it back down to the gravel shore to pluck and eat in the rapidly fading light, holding the bird down with his foot while ripping off and bolting down chunks of meat.
By the time his last meal was finished, the sun was almost completely set, and the thick fogbanks were returning again. After a quick bath in the surf, the Peracerdon leaped up to the ledge he was so familiar with, and then to the cave. Entering back inside, he crouched in his nest, laid down, shifted once, twice, and then went to sleep, having survived another Skull Island day. Seven hours later, the first rays of sunshine entered his cave, and the cycle began again.