Rat Trap

As they began to grow, the raptor twins were outgrowing their hatchling stomping grounds. They felt like two big fish in a small pond, cramped by the lack of sizable food and the competition only being other scrawny youngsters. The cruelty of the outside world was unknown to them, so one day they simply decided to wander out of their wooded haven and find their fortune in the city that surrounded it. The rats and voles they caught in the park were starting to no longer fill their bellies and as they continued to stretch and mature they found themselves hungry more often than not. This was how they had ended up here, perched on the old rotten calcony of an apartment complex and watching a dark purple and black Utahraptor pick through the rubble. He was alone, no pack in sight, and the twins were waiting for him to catch something they could steal. When he brought his claw down on a flat piece of cardboard they were shocked to see blood bloom up through the material. He flipped it over and a large rat lay dead there. Piper and Sparrow's mouths watered and they looked at each other, nodding once. 

They jumped from the balcony, Piper landing on the raptor and Sparrow landing next to the rat. He tried to snatch up his prize but he was sideswiped by the adult raptor's tail hurtling towards him. It caught him directly across the chest and winded him, though not as much as having his twin sister thrown at him winded him. 

"Hey, whoa, take it easy!" the older raptor snapped. "You'll get yourselves into trouble pulling shit like that." Piper fluffed up in outrage but Sparrow, thinking quickly, put his arm in front of her and stepped between the two.

"Look dude, we're just trying to survive, you remember how it was, right?" he appealed. The older raptor sighed, the indignation leaving him entirely.

"I remember, that's why I worry for little shits like you," he said sternly.

"So? You gonna help us out or beat us up, your choice," Piper growled, ignoring her brother's pleading expression.

The other raptor seemed to ponder this for a minute, scratching his chin and looking down the street. 

"Yeah, actually, I could teach you a thing or two," he said slowly. "You kids know how to trap yet?" The twins both shook their heads. "Alright, trapping, we'll start with that and see how you do at it." He scooped up the dead rat in his claws and carried it with him as they walked through the city streets. "Name's Equinox by the way."

"I'm Sparrow, that's Piper," Sparrow introduced them in turn.

"We could just eat that," Piper interjected, pointing at the rat.

"You could, now, this won't be a meal when you get a little bigger. You won't make it to adulthood surviving off scraps like that." Equinox warned. He stepped out into the street, looking up and down the road like he was checking the coast was clear. "We're near the edge, we'll find bigger prey outside the city."

"Bigger predators too," Sparrow added. 

"Nothing I can't handle," Nox puffed, "Alright, follow me."

As the buildings thinned out around them the ground changed from cracked and bent concrete to hard soil, closer to what had been under their claws in the forest. Nox walked along the tree line until he found a spot that he found agreeable, then began to dig down. With a few swipes of his powerful bear-sized arms, he had already made a hole that the twins could shit in comfortably. They joined him instinctively without being asked, feeling useless just sitting and watching him. The manual labour felt good, in a strange way, the methodical work reminding them of foraging for grubs as freshly hatched babies. Piper shook the dirt from her feathers and looked up, realising she had dug herself into a hole too deep to climb out of. Before she could panic, Equinox's voice came from above. 

"Uh..." she started, but Nox jumped down into the hole with her.

"I gotcha," he said, pushing her up out of the pit and flattening out the soil beneath him. He scaled the side easily, only kicking a fraction of dirt back into the hole as he did so. He reached up to the trees and grabbed branches, snapping them off and laying them like a blanket over the hole. "Now," he said, pointing at the tree line, "See the way the light changes between here and the trees? Makes it real hard for anything to notice the ground looking different, which means we need to remember where it is too."

"I fell in one of these once," Sparrow said quietly, "When I was a hatchling, Piper had to pull me out of it." Nox winced.

"You've been on the other side of this then, so you know it's a pretty good way of trapping something, right?" he tried to pull the lesson back around to the application for hunting. "What we're gonna do is find some deer, chase them this way, they run for the trees to try and shake us, one falls in the hole, we jump down and finish it off. Simple, right?" Sparrow nodded, it did sound simple the way the dark purple raptor explained it. Nox grinned in response, his mouth pulling in a way that made the white skull-like marking on his face look like it was smiling too. 

"Are there deer near here? We'll have to hunt them down anyway," Piper huffed.

"There are, there's fresh water here," Nox explained, "And this isn't replacing the tracking part of hunting, it just handles the dangerous part where you have to get up close and personal. That's when most injuries happen, and you can't hunt when you're injured." He shook the rat he still held in his claws. "This is useful to bait the trap for anything carnivorous, you can even 'hide' it somewhere and keep watch, see what comes scavenging." The twins hung on his every word, even when he waved the rat around. Maybe these kids were smart enough to make it, he thought to himself.