Chapter 2: Raptor

Manny Price looked at the velociraptor before him. Lakota, the only surviving member of this hatching was hardly a cute baby. True, she was covered in fluffy down and would immediately turn to face anyone that came near her with her mouth open expecting to be fed, but raptor chicks were not very charismatic none the less. Like chicken chicks they were born with bulging blind eyes, soaked with egg fluid and unable to move beyond some weak half-flopping movements. However, by the time they had reached a few days old they were fully capable of standing on their own and had puffed out with downy soft feathers. Raptor chicks were about the same size as a turkey chick but were vomit colored and grey. The would wait with their mouths open, already with a mouth full of sharp little teeth for adults to throw up in their mouths or if they were old enough, drop tiny pieces of meat into their waiting maws and would flap their arms and make a bitchy squeaking- hissing noise if they weren't fed.

Velociraptors aged quickly and were lethal by eight months old, fully grown by a year, but most of the raptors in Jurassic Park never lived that long. Lakota was the 12th raptor born in this hatching, but was the only one to live beyond a few days. Infant mortality was very high in any genetically created animal, let alone a dinosaur who had been patched together out of DNA scraped from the stomach contents of a fossilized insect. Despite three decades of research, genetic yields in Jurassic Park were around 1.3%, which was still a huge improvement on the .25% it had been in the early days of the JP project. Manny lowered the head of the raptor puppet to drop a tiny piece of meat into Lakota's eager mouth.

Manny had become famous for his work with pack animals in Montana when he had been locally known as the "Real Wolfman". Manny found it to be a fairly apt description; he was in his mid-forties with a constant grizzled half growth of beard and long graying hair that he left hang loose down his back. A fairly broad nose and very bushy eyebrows, surrounded beetle black eyes in the tanned and weather worn face. Manny was a Sioux on his father's side and Mexican- American on his mother's side, but in truth with his grizzled appearance and wild nature is looked more like some Paleolithic Neanderthal stepped out of the past.

Manny had always been an outdoorsy sort and had been spending every spare moment he could find out in the Rocky Mountains and Big Sky Country. He had dropped off the radar completely after college, where he had done his graduate work on animal behaviors, and had moved to a cabin way out in the backwoods where his only neighbors were animals and trees. Living completely self-sufficiently from the land, Manny had only descended from his mountains to meet with his publicist to discuss his various books. Manny had written and drawn these books on the wildlife around his cabin and they were now a very popular series of science-minded guide books to bird, insect and plant life in the area. However, it had been his work with wolves that had really made Manny a legend. He had lived among them, a segregate member of their pack, for nearly four years and had written several books about pack dynamics and wolf behavior complete with full color illustrations done by Manny himself.

In the end, it had been these books that had drawn the attention of INGEN. Six years ago Manny had been more than a little surprised to return to his cabin one night to find a very pretty red-haired woman in khaki's waiting for him. He never got visitors least of all women, but he knew who she was immediately. Sarah Harding, the premiere expert on lions and hyenas in the world. He had been acutely aware of his hand made buckskin clothes and the fact that he must smell like wolf, since he had just been visiting with the pack, but Sarah didn't seem to care.

"D- Doctor Harding…" He said extending a hand, "I- What brings you to Montana?"

Sarah smiled and shook his hand without glancing twice at the dirt caked under the nails.

"I'm helping out with a study of big horn sheep, but since I was around anyway I wanted to come see you. I've read all your books. Year of the Wolf was particularly interesting their acceptance of you is extraordinary."

"That's kind of you Dr. Harding" Manny said sheepishly

"Sarah." Sarah cut in, "Call me Sarah, everyone does."

"Okay, Sarah," Manny said with a smile, "I don't get to keep up with the scientific journals much out here, but I read that article you put out on the pack behavior of Hyenas a few months ago. Did they really trap you in a tree like a possum?"

Sarah laughed, "Oh yeah, that baobab tree was my home for three days before they pushed off finally."

Manny had invited her into his cabin and had spent an extremely enjoyable afternoon discussing the pack behavior of wolves and hyenas. It was a little towards dark when Sarah had mentioned her real purpose for visiting.

"Manny, I can completely understand if you wouldn't want to give this up, but me and my old man are working with a company that's working on something that's right up our alley. They asked me if I knew a good naturalist to supervise a small pack of animals for a zoo their developing. I think it would be right up your alley."

He frowned, in general Manny didn't approve of zoos, he thought that animals should be free to live the way that nature intended. However, when he had pointed this out to Sarah she had laughed and simply said that that would be somewhat difficult given the circumstances. She had explained that she couldn't go into details since she was bound by non-disclosure agreements, but that if he were up for a challenge that he should come down to Costa Rica and check it out for himself. He had, and what he had seen had made his jaw hit the floor.

Manny dropped tiny pieces of meat in Lakota's mouth using the raptor puppet to simulate an adult female raptor to get used to taking food from them. He had been present for the birth of every raptor from Jurassic Park's gen 2 project and had been with the raptors of gen 1 most of their lives as well. Lakota would be the ninth raptor in the Jurassic Park pack if she survived, and Manny believed she would, as long as she didn't try to pick a fight with Goldie the alpha.

He had been shocked at first at the vicious nature of the raptors, most of the raptors from gen 1 had killed each other off. They had been constantly in fighting and outright hostile to each other, which was very unusual with pack animals. Usually, a pack had a very firm and clearly established pecking order with the alpha at the top and the omega at the bottom. Everyone knew their place in the pack and the hierarchy was fiercely enforced, but not so with raptors. Right from the beginning Manny had observed that the structure was not really pack-like at all, it was more like a gang of chimps than a pack of wolves or lions. Every member of the pack below the alpha seemed to have equal standing in the group with had led to squabbles and in fighting which the Jurassic Park naturalists were at a loss to understand. It had been Manny that had discovered the cause; he had found that the raptors were badly suited to life in captivity. The more you tried to control them, the more they rebelled and even though they were dinosaurs, you couldn't treat them the same way as you could treat the T-rex and expect it to work. It was a question of their niche, while the scavenging Tyrannosaur was perfectly happy being feed dead meat or captive prey, the velociraptors decidedly did not.

Without the unifying drive of the hunt, the raptor's killer instincts had overflowed with disastrous results. Only Goldie, Bertha and Lucy were left from the original pack, all the others had been killed by their sisters. Manny had pushed hard and finally had been given what he had asked for, largely enclosures for the raptors and live wild prey to hunt. The bean counters had fussed that the dinosaurs were expensive and that they might get hurt in a live hunt, but Manny had finally won with the argument that NOT providing them with sufficient outlet for their hunting skills was killing them all. In the end, they had agreed to the larger enclosure, giving the raptors room to run and a habitat they seemed to like but had still been hesitant to release live wild prey. In the end, Manny had done it anyway, he had a deer brought in and released it into the raptor's enclosure the result of this hunt was immediate and overwhelming. Faced with real, wild, terrified, prey that was free to run and fight back, the raptors had gelled into a cohesive fighting force almost overnight.

"They're like jelly donuts." Manny had explained, "If you try to put your finger on the hole to stop the jelly squirting out, it just comes out somewhere else. Treat them like zoo animals and they get bored and their killer instincts turn back on themselves, but let them hunt and it squirts out where it needs to be and they calm down. The more you try to get them to behave the more they will resist you, it's simply not in their nature."

In light of this, Jurassic Park had formed a deer park as part of their formal gardens. Not one of the guests that patted the friendly, human loving, deer realized that they would ultimately end with a terrified chase and an unpleasant death at the hand of the JP raptor pack. Still, the deaths of some common mule deer had meant the salvation of the raptor pack. Oh, there was still infighting occasionally, but the fights were much less serious and never ended in fatalities. Moreover, the raptors had counterintuitively become more manageable around humans. Manny and his team were able to walk (carefully) right in among the pack in relative safety, though Manny never liked bringing in more men than was strictly needed. No point taking chances. The fact was that these animals were unpredictable and could turn on you in a heartbeat if you weren't really careful.

Manny found them fascinating, and spent all his spare time studying the raptors. He could recognize every member of the pack from a distance, just from the way she carried herself. They knew and trusted Manny, they had known him from the moment they were born and would likely know him until the moment they died. The raptors were about the same size as wolves, only much longer but the way they walked bobbing their heads, combined with their iridescent green- blue feathers gave them a very birdlike appearance. They had long feathers on their arms which were like proto-wings which they used for changing directions quickly without slacking their speed, which was incredibly fast for a biped. All and all the raptors reminded Manny of land based falcons, which he considered, they likely were. He had been told that to fill the gene sequence gaps the genetists had used a combination of falcon, raven and cassowary DNA, to make dinos that were light, fast, and intelligent.

Manny was just finishing up with Lakota when his radio chirped, it was Gerry Harding, VP of Product. Harding had been brought on to the JP early on as a vet, today he was the overseer for every animal at the INGEN facilities. Manny knew that Harding would only be calling if it was important; probably he was calling all dino heads with results of the corrumn.

"Comeback." Manny said into the radio as he left the nursery.

"Manny, the corrumn has voted to move forward with step two. How soon can you and your team prep the girls for travel?" Harding asked over the radio.

"We should be all set in about four days." Manny said looking at his work schedule, he was going to have to get his team together if they were going to relocate the pack. "So we're going to finally go for it huh?"

"10-4" Harding responded, he didn't sound excited. "Over and out."

Manny re-clipped the radio to his belt and rubbed his hands together, he had work to do.