Scythe and Bumpus

240 MPE

Savannah (South Anciska)

~~~

Dusk. As the sun slips below the horizon, the day's creatures give way to those of the night. Shift change brings some to roost and others to rise. It is prime time for the night's hunters to strike the unwary as they settle in to rest.

A scythe peers its head out of the tall grass, scanning the plains for an opportunity. This strange, 6 foot high placental bird is, at least by descent, an ornkey. But it little resembles its little, tree-climbing ancestors of the early Pangeacene. It is terrestrial, and it is a predator. Equally long of arm and leg, it hasn't committed quite to bipedalism or to quadupedalism - it alternates as it sees fit. Its shoulders are extremely flexible, a remnant of ancestors which swung through trees. Now it uses its arm rotation to snatch prey and run off with it if its small - or to restrain it for a killing bite if it's big. The scythe is named for the shape of its beak; starkly down-turned and wickedly sharp, it resembles a saber and is now used to sever the spinal cord of prey animals as it pounces from behind and restrains them with its clawed arms. Yet the shape arose millions of years earlier, in a species not only still arboreal, but also herbivorous. The scythe arose from a parrot-like ornkey which used its hooked bill to open and crack fruits and nuts. Its ancestors only broadened their diets when a drying climate reduced the extent of forest in the center of the landmass where it lived, an event which also led them down to a life on the ground.

The scythe spots movement nearby and slips back out of sight. It drops to four legs and creeps close to a herd of bumpuses, grazing in the evening twilight. They are huge, strange tribtiles - a grade of tribbets generally allied by a cold-blooded metabolism and sprawling forelegs. But bumpuses are an enigma; they have mesothermic metabolisms (they can raise their body temperature a few degrees above ambient in cooler conditions, but lack a set temperature that they always default to) and their legs can switch from sprawling to upright stance when necessary for short-term bursts of speed. Not closely related to tribbetheres, they convergently resemble them. Their visible jaws, though, are simpler. Many of the independently mobile elements in the skull have fused, and these creatures can neither extend their mouths outwards, not chew their food with back and forth grinding. They are, nevertheless, herbivores, but their teeth are simple and conical. They feed by tearing mouthfuls of vegetation and swallowing it whole. Then, it is chewed with an additional, internal pair of pharyngeal jaws in the throat, with broad, flat cusps which crush the foliage before digestion. Tribbetheres have lost these additional jaws over time, and so this is the most important distinction between these two lineages.

The bumpuses are social animals, adults sticking close together and forming a barrier around their young, which lack the spiky horn-like keratin growths that ornament the snouts of mature individuals. Males, with larger racks, tussle head to head for dominance, but these groups include multiple males, and none is evicted. Females, too, sport horns, though theirs are smaller and used entirely for defense. Growing up to 400 lbs, they are slow but sturdy animals which find safety in numbers. When one bumpus might be vulnerable, a herd is not. They come to another's defense, and collectively overpower most enemies.

The scythe, a young adult only recently independent of its mother, has underestimated them. It jumps out from the grass in the midst of the herd and grabs a helpless bumpus calf in its arms in one quick swoop. The scythe makes a move to run, but the infant squeals shrilly, a din which alarms the herd and sends them charging and snorting in its direction. The sudden shriek causes only a moment of hesitation to the scythe, taking it too by surprise. That is all the herd needs to surround it, blocking its escape. The adults close in around the predator, snapping jaws at its tail and narrowly missing goring its underbelly as it frantically dodges their attacks. Hunger is overtaken by self-preservation, and the scythe drops the calf, which tumbles with a faint whimper, but runs away none the worse for wear. The adults, though, are not finished. They crowd around, shove, and bite at the enemy off until it finally manages to break free, jump up over their backs and dash away into the grass out of sight, bruised and battered, but alive, which is better than some scythes have come off in similar situations with the herd before. The scythe will come away with a lesson. Prey is not helpless fodder to be harvested, but formidable in its own right. A hunter fights to eat a meal, but each fight for prey is for life. When push comes to shove, often the latter fights harder. It has the most to lose.

Not all hunts succeed, indeed most ultimately fail. Neither do most species succeed. Extinction is the norm, survival the exception. Both the scythe and the bumpus today face an uncertain future. Far from being revolutionary examples of adaptation, they are outliers with no close relatives, living in a world dominated by more common competitors. Bumpuses are inefficient feeders compared to molodonts like the omniphages and circuagodonts, and their range has shrunk as those species have spread. Scythes, adapted to hunt flightless birds including other ornkeys, are much less effective at killing the tribbets now coming to dominate grazer guilds, whose thicker skin and stronger self-defenses make them difficult and dangerous targets. The late Pangeacene is a time of change, and with change comes a thinning of the numerous species which evolved in the vacuum of the beginning Pangeacene. There was a time where there was no competition, and life ran wild with experimental forms. But now, a few winners begin to overtake many losers.

By the end of this epoch, only the fittest shall remain.