Riddlepigs and the Cryla: Portia Oakeshott, Dinosaur Veterinarian, #1

By Raymund Eich

As a girl, Portia Oakeshott dreamed of caring for the reconstructed dinosaurs roaming the preserve near the south pole of her home planet, New New South Wales.

As a new hire at the dino company, Portia's first call sends her to an isolated farmhouse and across the perimeter into the preserve itself, in pursuit of a rogue carnivore, a female Cryolophosaurus. A cryla.

 

Amid a forest of ferns and cycads, Portia learns a lesson never taught by her professors at veterinary school. A lesson in what "caring for dinosaurs" really means.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CV-2 Books
• Release date: May 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201719043

Raymund Eich

Raymund Eich files patent applications, earned a Ph.D., won a national quiz bowl championship, writes science fiction and fantasy, and affirms Robert Heinlein's dictum that specialization is for insects.In a typical day, he may talk with university biology and science communication faculty, silicon chip designers, patent attorneys, epileptologists, and rocket scientists. Hundreds of papers cite his graduate research on the reactions of nitric oxide with heme proteins.He lives in Houston with his wife, son, and daughter.

Book preview

Riddlepigs and the Cryla

Riddlepigs and the Cryla

A Portia Oakeshott, Dinosaur Veterinarian Short Story

Raymund Eich

CV-2 Books

Copyright © 2020 by Raymund Eich

First published in Analog, Jan/Feb 2021.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover art: Image ID 171717263 © Daniel Eskridge | Dreamstime.com

Cover design, book design, and aircraft carrier logo are copyrights, trademarks, or trade dress of CV-2 Books.

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Contents

Riddlepigs and the Cryla

About the Author

Other Books by the Author

Riddlepigs and the Cryla

The quadrotor flier banked over fields and paddocks aligned with the contours of the land. From just above the northern horizon, the K6 sun, Stella Australis A, threw shadows of houses, barns, and scattered groves of oaks and elms long distances over the slender ribbons of purple-black living asphalt and slate gray gravel linking the human habitations to the nearest town.

All familiar sights. Portia Oakeshott’s gaze went due south. Pasture land gave way to the perimeter strip of untamed grasses dotted with trees. Judging from the color and texture of foliage, some were elms and oaks, but the trees common to the inhabited territories of New New South Wales shared the terrain with deeper, wilder greenery: cycads, conifers, woody ferns. Further south, between the perimeter and the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Lesser South Polar Range peeking through the blue haze at the horizon, the deeper green thickened. The dinosaur preserve.

She’d entered the preserve on training missions, but now was the first time no senior veterinarian mentored her.

The quaddy descended toward the last