“You never should have taken that egg. That’s the first rule about wilderness—leave wildlife alone!”
You don’t find a fantastic creature like a baby dinosaur, and say,’ Oh, I think I’ll keep it so my dad can be famous and make a few bucks!’ You’d be a jerk.”
Her first instinct was to safeguard the tunnels leading to her nest. She roared and lurched, sniffing through every side chamber and alcove. Then she traced and retraced her steps, returning each time to count her eggs. Eleven. Each time when she returned she saw only eleven. Finally, she had calmed enough to know what had happened. She began to shriek, cries steeped in pain and sorrow and rage. Her body shook with anguish, and she withheld her body heat from her nest.
“He’s a death spirit,” Zack had heard one of the old Ute Indian workers say about him. “His heart is like death.”
Suddenly, beyond the animal, an enormous form began to emerge from the darkness. He saw a bounding shadow of pebbled, leathery skin racing toward him. It was the shape of a creature familiar to him from textbooks and years of exhuming bones. A thing he had studied his whole life.
Oh, God. Oh, God …
A scream erupted from deep inside Norak as the creature began to run upright with shining eyes, a flash of teeth, and its stiff tail protruding behind it.
A raptor!
Something extinct!
Somewhere below—in the bowels of the network of rotting mine shafts and solution caves that riddled Silver Mountain—the murky shape of a mother lizard was looking for food near the base of a waterfall. She had searched for hours each day, ever since she’d felt motion beginning inside her eggs in the nest—a warning that there would soon be a dozen hatchlings clawing at her underside for food. Her instincts had told her it was time to gorge on blind mud fish and stubby-limbed bats—anything she could find hiding in the dark and damp crannies of the caves.