Cracking Jawed Dog Beast

On padded feet it steps quietly from shadowed glade into the evening light. The last rays of sunlight stream through the haze, and another hot summer's day is coming to a close. The golden beast stretches, scratching the dry soil with its talons, and then it shakes the dust of a long day's nap from its tawny fur. As day turns to dusk, Crepuitognathus robustus, the cracking-jawed dogbeast, goes looking for an evening meal.

Crepuitognathus is a formidable enemy to ground-dwelling herbivores of its era, coming in at 250 pounds of muscle. It is a crushing-jawed canithere, a member of a new lineage called barognatheres, adapted to bite larger prey animals and cause extreme damage, whilst earlier canitheres used extensible jaws to snatch small prey as it fled. Using ambush tactics, it stalks its quarry in wooded savannah thickets and the edges of forest pockets, sneaking closely up on its targets until it can lunge and reach them in just a few bounds. Slower than smaller canitheres, it is powerfully built and capable of wrestling targets several times its own weight to the ground. A hooked dewclaw on the outside of each forearm aids in its wrestling, while the jaws are used to get a hold of the back of the skull and crack it open, to obvious fatal result.

Tonight the dogbeast is hunting the biggest of the ornkeys, the lorilla, which can exceed him in size by 150 pounds. As the thickets turn dark and the nighttime world of buzzing insect calls replaces the day's birdsongs, a deadly hunter follows the trails where a group of the birds has traveled just hours earlier. Trampled and broken vegetation, pulled from the ground and eaten as they walked, gives clear indication of their presence, and the scent trail in prints left behind is still fresh. The lorillas are poor-sighted an vulneable in the dark, and so only the larger male remains on the ground as females and young retreat upwards into sturdy trees to roost. As the dogbeast silently circles around where the group has settled to sleep, he takes note of the male, sleeping quietly with his back to the tree his family sleeps in. Though this predator could take down the king of the troop, he would risk injury if he did not perfectly land his bite and gave his target time to react, potentially blinding him it it managed to strike its long claws into the dogbeast's eyes. He will preferentially take the easier prey if it is available to him - and to his luck, an adolescent lorilla is sleeping slightly too low in the tree for safety. Though it might seem out of reach to most canitheres, Crepuitognathus is not most canitheres. This dogbeast can climb.

The hunter moves in for the kill, racing toward the tree and leaping upwards, catching the bark with its thumb claws and hoisting itself ten feet up in seconds. In an instant, a single muffled scream punctuates the night as the group's last child is torn from the branches and dragged away into the darkness. Three female lorillas holler and bark out alarm cries, only now rousing their sleepy leader, who peers around trying to spot a danger already come and gone like a flash in the night. He has not succeeded in protecting his group, and there will soon be consequences for his lack of response to such a deadly breach of security.

The dogbeast takes its kill back to its den. Emitting a soft mewing call that does not seem to match its brawny appearance and fierce nature, we learn that this ferocious killer is also a mother. A single small, clumsy kit emerges from a bramble patch, chirping with anticipation of supper. While this dogbeast is not a social animal, for now maternal hormones flood her brain, shutting off aggressive drives which would leave her racing to attack any adult intruder to her territory. She tolerates as her young jumps up and paws at her face and even as it bites her lip in its frenzied excitement to eat. Unlike the old lorilla king, the mother dogbeast has so far succeeded in keeping her offspring protected. As she cuts open the belly of the prey and watches over the kit as it eats, she can take a moment now to rest. But not for long - life is dangerous for everyone. There are no guarantees for tomorrow.

But for today, right now, all is okay in her world. 

The worlds of other animals simply didn't matter to her. For now, the ability to see through the eyes of another is not something the animals of Serina can do. For every animal, every day is a battle of us-versus-them. To each species, and in many cases to each individual, only its own tale is of any importance.

But in an age where animal behaviors continue to grow more complex, it is not impossible that one day, life on the world of birds may not have to be quite so cutthroat and competitive.

~~~

Unbeknowst to the dogbeast, she had already changed from the start. As a solitary, bloodthirsty killer gently now nuzzled her innocent child, a lone, distant observer watched over a world in quiet transition.

And it realized that it too was slowly changing with the world it oversaw.