The Jeep tires rolled across soft earth.
Thorne brought the car to a stop.
Silence.
They peered out the windows, trying to see where they were. But it was so dark, it was hard to see anything. They seemed to be at the bottom of a deep gully, a canopy of trees overhead.
“Alluvial contours,” Levine said. “We must be in a streambed.”
As his eyes adjusted, Thorne saw he was right. The raptors were running down the center of the streambed, which was lined with big boulders on both sides, But the bed itself was sandy, and it was wide enough for the car to pass through. He followed them.
“You have any idea where we are?” Levine said, staring at the raptors.
“No,” Thorne said.
The car drove forward. The streambed widened, opening out into a flat basin. The boulders disappeared; there were trees on both sides of the river. Patches of moonlight appeared here and there. It was easier to see.
But the raptors were gone. He stopped the car, rolled down the window, and listened. He could hear them hissing and growling. The sound seemed to be coming from off to the left.
Thorne put the car in gear, and left the streambed, in moving off among ferns and occasional pine trees. Levine said, “Do you suppose the boy survived that hill?”
“I don’t know,” Thorne said. “I can’t imagine.”
He drove forward slowly. They came to a break in the trees, and saw a clearing where the ferns had been tram led flat. Beyond the clearing, they saw the banks of the river, moonlight glinting on the water. Somehow they had returned to the river.
But it was the clearing itself that held their attention. Within the broad open space, they saw the huge pale skeletons of several apatosaurs. The giant rib cages, arcs of pale bone, shone in the silver light. The dark hulk of a partially eaten carcass lay on its side in the center, clouds of flies buzzing above it in the night.
“What is this place?” Thorne said. “It looks like graveyard.”
“Yes,” Levine said. “But it’s not.”
The raptors were all clustered to one side, fighting over the remains of Eddie’s carcass. At the opposite side of the clearing they saw three low mud mounds; the walls were broken in many places. Within the nests they saw crushed fragments of eggshells. There was the strong stench of decay.
Levine leaned forward, staring. “This is the raptor nest,” he said.
In the darkness of the trailer, Malcolm sat up, wincing. He grabbed the radio. “You found it? The nest?”
The radio crackled. Levine said, “Yes. I think so.”
“Describe it,” Malcolm said.
Levine spoke quietly, reporting features, estimating dimensions, to Levine, the velociraptor nest appeared slovenly, uncared for, ill-made. He was surprised, because dinosaur nests usually conveyed an unmistakable sense of order. Levine had seen it time and again, in fossil sites from Montana to Mongolia. The eggs in the nest were arranged in neat concentric circles. Often there were more than thirty eggs in a single nest, suggesting that many females cooperated to share a single mud mound. Numerous adult fossils would be found nearby, indicating that the dinosaurs cared communally for the eggs. At a few excavations, it was even possible to get a sense of the spatial arrangement, with the nests in the center, the adults moving carefully around the outside, so as not to disturb the incubating eggs. In this rigid structure, the dinosaurs were reminiscent of their descendants the birds, which also displayed precise courtship, mating, and nest-building patterns.
But the velociraptors behaved differently. There was a disorderly chaotic feeling to the scene before him: ill-formed nests; quarreling adults; very few young and juvenile animals; the eggshells crushed; the broken mounds stepped on. Around the mounds, Levine now saw scattered small bones which he presumed were the remains of newborns. He saw no living infants anywhere in the clearing. There were three juveniles, but these younger animals were forced to fend for themselves, and they already showed many scars on their bodies. The youngsters looked thin, undernourished. Poking around the periphery of the carcass, they were cautious, backing away whenever one of the adults snapped at them.