Child On Fire
an excerpt

(Unedited, and certainly not proofread. Enjoy, if your eyes don't fall out first. :D)

Bolor hung low in the grass, breathing shallowly. So far away from his home territory, the grass was shorter than he was used to. He had to constantly remind himself to stay as low as possible, to keep himself mostly covered, and to move very slowly. In the bright yellow grass, his dark feathers would stick out like a sore thumb. He poked his head above the plant life quickly to locate a large, shaking patch of grass a few yards in front of him. There were twenty, maybe thirty protoceratops traveling across their migration path that day, and it was probably the biggest meal Bolor had seen since they’d left Batu in the mesa. With them, even, were several Oviraptors, each three or four feet tall, and almost ten feet long. It was a lot of meat. There were no young, which was regrettable, because the young were the easiest to pick off. Still, he knew that they could easily take down more than enough of the small animals, hatchlings or not.

Bolor poked his head up again, and spotted Dash easily. The smaller, grey and brown Achillobator was standing erect, well above the grass, and looking straight at him. Bolor opened his jaws and nodded downwards frantically - Dash responded, quickly remembering their position, and ducked back below the grass.

Bolor, regrettably, had to stick his head above to find his pack. He didn’t have the same nose as Qulan, and while he could tell what was out there, he would be a mile off every time he tried to tell where it was. However, his own personal weakness was no excuse for the rest of his pack to expose themselves for any reason.

Bolor had to scan the grass carefully for several minutes before he could locate Qulan, Vachir, Chinua, and Alagh. He never found Bayar, she was so well hidden, but he assumed that she was somewhere near Chinua. That meant that the two of them were on one side of the flock, Vachir and Qulan were on the other side, Dash and Alagh were around the back, and he was in front. (Bat and Solongo were nowhere to be seen - Bat was too crippled to hunt, and Solongo refused to leave him unprotected.) It was lopsided, definitely, but it wasn’t as though there were a possibility of them not catching any prey. Protoceratops were small, but they stood out, moved slowly, and had essentially no intelligence. Perfect targets.

Bolor took a deep breath to sooth his raging nerves. Loudly, he tapped his claw into the hard-packed dirt. It should have been muffled by the grass, but instead echoed and resounded across the prairie. Maybe not loud enough that any prey could hear it, but clearly enough that any Achillobator for ten miles around could easily have picked it out of white noise.

Right on the cue, Dash and Alagh exploded out of the grass - teeth and claws bared - and leaped onto the creatures nearest them. Alagh broke a poor protoceratop's back with his weight alone (a quater of a ton), and Dash wrestled with a horrified Oviraptor for less than a minute before he sunk his teeth into its neck. The flock started to charge forward, which was right when Bolor jumped out, raised to his fullest, most frightening display. He hissed and spat, hot foam dripping down his muzzle, and the flock turned again.

Vachir and Qulan jumped out then, flying clear over several protoceratops before they landed right in the middle of the pack. It started to scatter, but the animals were so confused that it was easy for the bators to pick off several protoceratops each. Not to be outdone, Chinua dove into the running flock and snapped up two of his own. Bolor didn’t see Bayar at all, but she must have been successful, because later on he caught her munching on a large oviraptor thigh. Before the flock had dissipated completely, Bolor pounced on two large buck protoceratops - taking them down one at a time, of course.

All in all, the attack was very successful. Such small, dumb animals were easy pickings. Oviraptors were usually skittish, twitchy, spidery animals that could hear danger a mile away, but the ones there had never seen a predator as large as them. They were most likely used to velociraptors, and the odd Estesia. Never an Achillobator, and certainly not a whole pack of them. They were fat and their senses had dulled from being so safe all of their lives, which made this almost as easy for Bolor as going to the supermarket and buying groceries.

Happily, Bolor bit deep into one of the bodies’ stomachs. He didn’t waste time disemboweling it, just ripped out a chunk of skin and whatever meat was underneath, and gobbled it right up. The skin was tough, leathery, almost armor, but it didn’t hurt his teeth. They were designed to slice though hard skin and muscles, strong enough to split bone down the middle. His stomach could easily digest whatever he swallowed. The only limitations Bolor had to what he could eat was what he could fit in his mouth. He could have eaten grass and dirt, even, if worst came to worst. But thankfully, he had
protoceratops. There was no need for soil consumption at the moment.

The pack members all ate separately, savoring their kills. Solongo and Bat passed by each of them in the course of the meal, and the Achillobators (realizing their friends’ obvious plight) were happy to share in their kill. They finished very quickly in comparison to some meals; only about ten minutes of voracious gobbling and every carcass was stripped to the bone. Several even had the bones cracked open so that marrow could be eaten out. Dash, being his neurotic self, bit off another piece of rib for him to gnaw on as they traveled.

Where the first protoceratops had fallen, the pack met up quickly when they finished. Bat licked the crusty blood off of his muzzle, and Bolor was happy to see that all of the walking had strengthened him - he no longer had to lean on Solongo when they ran. His gait was, of course, hobbling and slow. But it was running, and that was a crucial step. Bolor hooted, then, to draw all of their attention.

He planned to run the whole day through to work off their meal to its fullest potential, and then take the next day easy. It was this type of foresight that had kept them all from starving or dying of exhaustion after so long traveling. Under Batu or Bat, or even Suren, they surely would have been dead. The previous leaders were all great, no doubt, but in a different way. They were the biggest and could kill the most. They were not the ones most intellectually suited to leading the pack halfway across Laurasia.

The pack set off at a relatively slow canter, still only about 5 miles an hour. It wouldn’t take them very far in very little time, but in a whole day, they could make maybe thirty miles of progress. That was a whole lot. It only took a minute or so for the pack to break into an almost single-file line. Again, it was headed by Bolor, followed by his second mate, and ended in Alagh, making sure Bat stayed ahead. They were a motley crew, all different sizes and colors, with a cripple and an attention-challenged, twittering girl in their ranks, but Bolor had little doubt they were the most fearsome things for miles around. Miles! After all, they were not only big and sharp, they were smart. Nothing, not even raptors could have been as dangerous as them.

He was wrong, of course.