Senta was waiting at the side of the road in front of her home when Graham arrived the next day at eleven.  She was dressed in her latest acquisition—a sunny yellow dress with a low back that showed off her shoulder blades.  Graham didn’t own a steam carriage, so she expected him to arrive on foot.  He surprised her by instead showing up in the back of a rickshaw, reclining in comfort as a large lizzie pulled him along.  There were two seats on the vehicle balanced above two spoked wheels and the lizzie pulled it with two long poles which stuck out the front.

“What’s this then?” she asked.

“Pretty ace, isn’t it?  Mrs. Government had them brought over from Sumir.  The lizzies can buy them and set up their own business pulling us softskins around.”

Senta picked up the picnic basket from beside her foot and stuffed it behind the rickshaw seat next to the similar basket that Graham had brought with him.  Then she climbed up and sat down next to him.

“Do you think this lizzie can pull us both?”

“You hardly weigh anything at all.  Besides, Canron here could pull four or five of these things tied together.”

He turned to the reptilian and gave directions in the lizzie language, which many humans, perhaps unkindly referred to as “spit-n-gag.”  After a quick reply in the same tongue, Canron turned the vehicle around and took off toward the center of town.

Augustus P. Dechantagne Park sat far out on the peninsula beyond the dockyards.  It had been designed by Governor Iolanthe Dechantagne-Staff and had been named for her youngest brother who had died in a battle with lizzies from the city-state of Suusthek.  It featured a gazebo, a walking path, and a statue of the aforementioned Augustus P. Dechantagne.  It also had a lovely copse of trees under which picnickers would gather during the summer.  As it was early spring however, Senta and Graham both preferred a spot in the open under the warming rays of the sun, and it was here that they headed, though they had not conferred aloud on the subject.  After unloading and dismissing the lizzie rickshaw, Graham spread a blanket out and they sat down to assemble roast beef sandwiches.

Roast beef in and of itself was something of a novelty, since it was only recently that cattle had arrived in Birmisia Colony.  Pork had been available for some time and many people, Graham and Senta included, had grown used to dinosaur meat as well.  This roast beef was tender and delicious, not surprising as it had come from Café Ada, which in addition to being the newest and most talked about eating establishment in Port Dechantagne, had a Mirsannan chef named Pierre Something.

As they ate their sandwiches, Graham looked around.  They were not the only people in the park.  Several children were playing an ad-hoc game of football.  Five or six other couples and at least one family were seated on their own blankets enjoying their own noon day meals.  A young couple, four of five years older than Graham and Senta, sat on a park bench and kissed when they thought no one else was looking.

“We could be doing that,” said Graham.

“Oh, so now you want a kiss.  What happened to ‘she’s not my girlfriend’?”

“I haven’t said that in a long time—years maybe.  Everybody knows you’re my girlfriend.”

“Everybody who?” wondered Senta.

“Everybody everybody.”

“Well I don’t just give kisses away.  I need a sign of devotion.”

“What kind of a sign?”

“Something that lets everyone know that I’m your girlfriend.”

“And what would that be?”

“You’ll figure something out.”

Leaning back on her hands, she turned her face up toward the warmth of the sun.

Birmisia was full of life in the spring.  Wildflowers seemed to suddenly appear just about everywhere.  The days were warm and wet, with frequent fog and almost daily rain showers.  The giant maples grew new leaves, adding their lustrous green to the ever-present deep emerald of the tremendous pines.  Ferns opened up their fronds in the dappled light beneath the mighty trees and in those places with no light, large and varied mushrooms showed their rounded heads.  Plants were not the only life forms present though.  The land was alive with both birds and beasts.  One could easily spot cormorants, snipes, rails, and wrens hopping through the trees along with the strange four-winged microraptors.  A few godwits, grebes, puffins, and pelicans occasionally strayed inland from the shore.   On the ground caudipteryx, buitreraptors, bambiraptors, meilong, and mahakala ran among the ferns looking for small lizards and snakes and large insects which were everywhere.  They didn’t bother the opossums or the mice, which stayed snug in their dens until nightfall.  In the open areas huge iguanodons grazed, sometimes accompanied by triceratops and ankylosaurs.  Most of the large predators like the tyrannosaurs and utahraptors had become scarce due to the presence of man, though the velociraptors and deinonychus were still thick, as happy to scavenge human trash as to hunt the other Birmisian creatures.

A flock of seven velociraptors made their way down the road.  They went in fits and starts, pausing to snatch a lizard or small rodent from among the ferns and squawking at each other.  They were, like all of their species, covered with hairy feathers, yellow near their small arms, and green everywhere else.  Most of this particular group had a black band around the base of their necks.  They were only about two and a half feet tall, but their long tails stretched straight out almost five feet.  The most famous features of the velociraptors were their feet, each of which had a three inch claw curving upward, and their long many-toothed snouts, more like something one would expect to see on a crocodile than on a bird.  The leader of the flock raised its head as it spotted a human walking toward them from down the lane.

Velociraptors seldom hunted human beings unless one was wandering alone and injured.  It had little to do with size.  Some of the animals who fell to the feathered runners were much larger than man-size.  Though velociraptors were not known for their intelligence, they possessed a cunning that matched most aerial birds of prey and this allowed them to determine which potential targets were more likely to become their supper than the other way around.  Simply put, most humans didn’t act like prey.  A few did.  They started, and jumped with fear.  But most didn’t.  They didn’t quite act like predators either.  They blundered around the forest without regard to what they might run into.  To the velociraptors, they were simply too confusing to be bothered with unless there was nothing else to eat.  And in spring, here in Birmisia, there was plenty to eat.

Regardless of their intent on hunting this particular human, the flock fanned out, following their instinctual behavior for both hunting and defense.  Three took positions on either side of the road, moving in and among the shelter of the trees, while the leader moved into direct confrontation.  This way they formed a triangular trap around the animal, in this case a human, directing it forward and keeping its attention away from potential attackers on the side.  What happened next cemented in the tiny minds of the velociraptors as much as anything could, that this human was a poor choice for prey.