The Politics of Predators

A young adult nimicorn has slid into an icy creek and sprained one of its front legs. Though it manages to haul itself out with a laborious limp, it cannot keep pace with the others and falls quickly behind. It still trails its mother, though it has been independently feeding itself for six months, and calls her for reassurance. She pauses and starts to approach her offspring, but seeing again that it is no longer small and vulnerable, she changes her mind. The herd is moving off fast, sensing the drop in barometric pressure in the air that foretells a coming snowstorm and the need to bed down and take shelter. She mustn’t be separated from the group, and so she abandons her offspring. Her job, as far as her instincts tell her, is done, and she can no longer worry over its fate as another is already on the way. The injured thorngrazer’s plaintive bellows thereafter go unanswered.

But they don’t go unheard. Limping along at a snail’s pace, each step upon its sore leg difficult and heaving, it cries out for comfort as it always has. Snow begins falling, making visibility poor, and now it’s not certain which direction the herd has even gone. Mother is now beyond earshot, and the big baby experiences the trials of adulthood for the first time at the worst time: its struggles have attracted predators. Three hook-clawed sawjaws are now following it at a distance, their padded feet falling lightly on new-fallen snow. The thorngrazer turns back periodically to check them and each time they have closed the gap further, and its panic heightens. They are analyzing it, taking note of its injury, and planning their next move. It turns to face them and produces a deep rumble, thrashing its horns from side to side, and it is what they were waiting for. As the thorngrazer focuses its energy upon one, the other two dart around the sides and make their moves. One leaps onto the hapless prey’s back and digs in with its double wrist talons, causing it to rear upwards enough for the third to lunge and get a strangle-hold upon its throat. With one weighing it down from above and the others sawing at its neck, the injured nimicorn’s death is assured, but not immediate. Blood pools heavily in the snow as it fights to the very last, but it weakens quickly. It becomes hard to think soon, and even harder to move. Vision blurs, and everything becomes numb. Life ends, and a tired form collapses upon its side.

The sawjaws immediately turn their attention to the underbelly, slicing it open and reaching in to carve out mouthfuls of flesh. Yet no sooner than they take their first bites are they alerted to another animal coming in quickly from the side. The pack scatters just in time to avoid being hurdled into by an enormous, lumbering animal twice as large as their prey. Resembling a patchwork monster with a gigantic skull and a hooked beak like an oversized parrot set upon the huge form of a bear, It neither squawks nor roars, but rather produces something somehow worse than both, a sound so loud that the sawjaws instinctively close their ears shut and lower them against their heads. The intruder is more than twenty times larger than any of them, 2,000 pounds of raw muscle and rage. They can do nothing but watch as the dire bumblebear drags away their huge prize as if it was a ragdoll.

above: a mother dire bumblebear (Praedonius invictus, meaning "indomitable predator") secures a thorngrazer kill from an out of luck pack of hook-clawed sawjaws as bluetailed chatteravens gather in anticipation of scraps. This apex predatory bird has evolved from the truculent bumblebear, and become larger and meaner to prey primarily upon thorngrazers. Stealing, of course, is easier.

She could kill even a healthy grown thorngrazer, being larger and extraordinarily strong, and sometimes she does. But she is smart enough to know that letting others do the work for her saves both time and energy. She looks back at the pack, which dare not follow her, and then toward a nearby thicket. A much softer chuffing call is replied with a mewling from within, and a cub bounds clumsily out to meet its mother. She has acquired him a hearty dinner, and for very little work. As the baby excitedly tucks into the soft belly nearly opened for it by the sawjaws, its huge mother takes the tougher head region, crushing the bones in her jaws like cardboard. As she rapaciously feeds upon the carcass in single gluttonous gulps each large enough to sustain a sawjaw for days, the rightful hunters of the prey are powerless to intervene. If they are lucky, there might be some scraps to pick out of the frozen ground later in the night. If any of them even tried to approach the thief, the largest land carnivore and undisputed apex predator of their environment, they would be facing down death itself. Yet right under the bumblebear’s beak, bluetailed chatteravens - having gathered almost immediately as soon as the kill was made - do just that repeatedly. Small and flighted, they dance almost fearlessly in and out of the kill zone, taking bites of food. They are too small and nimble for the hunter to worry over, each able to eat just a few ounces of the massive slab of meat present. And the bluetails know that. They glance over at the sawjaws, beak full of food, and maintain eye contact as they swallow, almost like they were mocking the foiled hunters. They fill up their bellies alongside the huge killer, mostly ignored, occasionally jumping out of the way of an annoyed swat.

But then, once satiated, they do something strange. Some of them continue to brave the bear and pick up strips of meat and fly away with them. They flutter over the sawjaws and drop the tidbits. They repeat this process at least a dozen times, so that each of the sawjaws catches at least a few bites of food. The chatteravens land after each trip, and make eye contact with the predators again. There is no spoken word, no change of expression. There is, however, an understanding. For sharing even a little now with the sawjaws, from a kill that the bumblebear now claims and will guard until it is nearly totally consumed, the sawjaws will be more likely to allow them to feed from their future, more successful kills. The bumblebears are rare, having the lowest population density of any animal on land as each requires a large territory to sustain itself. Most of the carrion upon which the bluetails depend will come from these smaller and more agile hunters, but unlike the larger one, they are physically capable of catching and killing small birds.

It is thus only in their best interest to keep a good working relationship with them, and to stay in their favor.