Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear

plaintive.
    "Hunger and death . . . Thepredator . . . and its prey!"
    The lights came on again, dazzling Peter's eyes. In the center ring, two large animals faced each other with thick iron bars between--Sammy theCentrosaurus, whom they had met earlier, and something large and beautiful and nightmarish, a sleek brown and yellow demon with flashing emerald eyes, marked along its sides by slashes of white. It stood on two tensed legs, muscles corded beneath smooth scaled flesh. Its three-toed feet scratched the dirt beneath the iron cage, reminding Peter of a monstrous chicken. The beast's long tail swished back and forth stiffly, its tip slapping the bars behind, making the entire cage shudder. Along its neck and over its head rose two ridges of long, stiff, flat scales tipped with red, as if dipped in blood. Two long arms stretched from its trunk, ending in three expressive curling dactyls with black scimitar claws.
    Peter stared at the beast's snout and jaws and wanted to run. The crowd seemed to feel the same way--he could smell the tension in the air and heard their abrupt gasps, even from those who had seen this animal before. Harryhausen dug his fingers into the bench seat. From where they sat, fifteen yards away, Peter could smell the rich iguana-parrot scent and something sharper, described so vividly in Challenger and Doyle's book that he could recall the words now:
    It was the odor of a killing thing that wanted our blood, our meat, our bones; less a flow of atoms through the still air than a spiritual miasma, a sickly breath out of the rotting tropical regions of Hell . . .
    The pictures he had seen could conjure bad dreams, but none did the animal justice. For the first time in his young life, Peter felt distinctly mortal and unsure of where he stood in the great scheme of things, or whether indeed he even liked that scheme.
    Flagg the ringmaster had worked with this animal for two decades, yet did not approach the cage any closer than he had to. His voice, admirably enough, lost none of its sureness as he announced, " Altovenator ferox,the ferocious hunter on high, by no means the largest of the predators of ancient times . . . and by no means the smallest . . . See how he observes what might be a week-long feast, a plant-eatingCentrosaurus. The swift and hungry meets the slow and armored, and who can say how the match would end? As meat-eaters, where do your sympathies lie?"
    Peter measured the venator using the ringmaster as reference. Fourteen feet high, when reared back he scraped the upper bars of the cage. Peter's eye swept from tip of snout, past gaping mouth, vibrating wattle pendulous from its neck, green eyes ringed with vivid blue, a surprisingly narrow and swift-looking trunk still as thick as a bull in the middle, past broad haunch and along the stiffened tail like a partly frozen snake . . . Twenty-four feet long. The venator was deeply irritated to be among all these people, in plain view of a prey that could never be brought down.
    "And now . . . a man who has spent most of his life hunting and training dinosaurs, who knows more about these incredible animals than any man on Earth! Ladies and gentlemen, our supreme Master of Beasts,Vincent Shellabarger! "
    Shellabarger entered the ring in splendid tailored khaki jodhpurs and dark brown coat, with a flat-brimmed campaign hat. This time he carried only a short whip. The ringmaster backed out of the ring and Shellabarger stepped into the spotlight.
    "Behold the venator," he said, pronouncing it veh-NAY-tor. "Its scientific name speaks for itself. It is the hunter. We've worked together for thirty years now and I have a healthy respect for him--but he has no respect for me at all.
    "Smell the promise of death in the air! Hang on to your children, feel your legs tense with terror! The venator is a killer from a special world, not a world frozen in time, filled with throwbacks and sluggish lizards, as we once imagined dinosaurs to be, but a living and