My Uncle Warren used to shoot pterosaurs for sport before the California Prehistoric Endangered Species Act was signed, before a utahraptor ate my mother and father when they went camping down south, and before dinosaurs ever scared me. Often, Uncle Warren goes to the back deck and uses an air horn to scare away the pterosaurs sitting on the railing. A flock of them nests on the cliffs nearby and swoops over to the house whenever he grills up some steak. My Auntie Lynn always grabs her baseball bat when it’s dinnertime, waiting behind the sliding glass door until one of them lands on the railing, and then with an angry yell, breaks out onto the deck and chases them away.
Uncle Warren always says they’d make a good trophy, but I think they’re terrifying. They have sharp, tiny teeth that strip the meat off fish, which they pick to the bone and scatter across the backyard. One time, I was walking down the driveway to the car, and a fish fell out of the sky and onto my head. It was gross and painful, and one of the bones cut my scalp. I’m just thankful they’ve never been able to wrangle the raccoons they’re always fighting in the brush, chittering at each other like chihuahuas. Pterosaurs are sort of like black bears that can fly–easy to scare away but intimidating to run into when you’re taking out the trash. They’ve got massive skulls, with jawbones over a foot long, and their black eyes stare you down; they turn their heavy heads slowly, steadily, until their gaze locks with yours, and then with a mighty snap, they gnash their teeth. Your whole body freezes, your heart stops, and you wonder if you are about to be maimed.
We’ve learned the best way to scare off a pterosaur is a lot of noise and maniacle arm-waving. Become big, loud, and aggressive. Uncle Warren screams ableist slurs at them, which I think is a bit excessive, but I don’t want to tell him that. If he has anything in common with my dad, his brother, it's their intolerance of outsiders. I know pterosaurs aren’t exactly outsiders—they came here millions of years before we even evolved as a species—but they still seem to trespass on private property. We are simply too close to the cliffs, and with that proximity comes fish-eating monsters.
Auntie Lynn says Uncle Warren was a much happier guy before the California Prehistoric Endangered Species Act was signed. He got to shoot any pterosaur he wanted, which he loved—Uncle Warren can and will hunt anything that flies or runs his way. He has a taxidermied smilodon near the front door, sitting next to the umbrella stand like a guard dog. Our living room is full of mounted heads—a dire wolf from Southern California, a coelophysis he smuggled in from his less-than-legal hunting trip to Northern Africa, two therapsids that are so ugly I haven’t bothered asking what species they are, and his most prized trophy, a baby mammoth he shot and killed up in Alaska. Unfortunately, It is placed above the television, making nature documentaries very difficult to watch. I live in a house of guilt, riddled with a malcontent for the beasts that walk, scuttle, and fly among us.
I am not related to Auntie Lynn by blood, but I’d like to think she is my mother’s sister. She taught me to garden, fish, knit, cook, and clean up after a husband. She encouraged my studies, and when I took an interest in biology conservation, told me not to worry—my secret was safe with her. She and I agreed that Uncle Warren wouldn’t respond best to the news that I’ll be studying how to “act like a fed” in college next year. You see, Uncle Warren thinks the feds are the problem here, not letting us shoot and kill beasts at will. He often cites the Stand Your Ground law, but I don’t think that was ever passed in California.
Auntie Lynn has been driving me to my trauma-informed dinosaur group therapy sessions every Thursday night. While I sit with other teenagers who have lost family members or limbs to carnivores (other than Samuel, whose brother passed away after a freak stegosaurus accident), Auntie Lynn journals in the parking lot. She says she loves the time away from home (she only works at the thrift store part-time, so she spends most of her days at home) and that it gives her a chance to reflect on her values. She says since I came into her life, not as a niece but as a daughter, she’s been wondering why she never had kids herself. She says she was just never interested, and Uncle Warren would much rather kill a cub than raise a baby. Sometimes I wonder what she ever saw in him, especially because I never hear her say anything nice about him. They just don’t make sense. She’s just so down-to-earth, and Uncle Warren is just so . . . violent and weird.
When I was a kid, I hated visiting Uncle Warren’s house, which is now my home. I didn’t appreciate Auntie Lynn when I was little, and my mom would always have whispered conversations with her when their husbands were out on the back deck, so I always felt excluded. I was ignored by the adults and had no cousins to play with. Both my aunt and uncle were unlike my parents, who owned a small chain of upscale coffee shops down in Malibu, the kind that served cyclists, app designers, and women with small dogs in their purses. Auntie Lynn was a hippie—she had long grey hair, wore tie-dye, had over fifty potted plants in her home, and always rubbed aloe on my wounds. The house was small, cramped, and far from any neighbors. We’d eat tuna salad and saltines and talk about the downfall of American democracy. From a young age, I learned very quickly that the government was not to be trusted.
Years before I was born, Uncle Warren was heavily fined for an illegal activity I can only assume was related to poaching. Ever since then, he and my dad had it out for park rangers, police officers, judges, and even postal workers (who supposedly read letters detailing whatever illegal thing Uncle Warren had done and reported him). This mentality led to a brazen disregard for the law, encapsulating everything from speeding on residential streets to dumping garbage into the ocean; in fact, the only reason my parents died was because they ignored signs forbidding them from camping in hostile dinosaur territory and ended up getting eaten when they pitched their tent in a carnivore’s hunting grounds. I’d like to believe my mother didn’t know and was just going where my dad told her to go—she was much more cautious around prehistoric wildlife. I always expected my dad to die, if anything from the cigarettes he always smoked, but never my mother. I had thought she’d take care of me forever.
I feel guilty for disliking Uncle Warren, seeing as he stepped up to take me in when I was orphaned, but he makes it difficult for me to like him. There’s no way I’d ever be able to tell him that I want to work for the rainforests, preserving their biodiversity, or that I think having an entire living room of taxidermied animals is tacky. Trust me, I love collecting skulls and shark teeth and the like, but the dead young is a little unsettling. Last night, when we were eating dodo marinara, he told me had plans to go out to the cliffs and smash some pterosaur eggs. I told him eggs were also protected by state law, but he laughed and said no one would notice and that I was being dramatic and bratty. Auntie Lynn didn’t say anything, but later, when I was helping her clean up in the kitchen, she told me he had recently stocked up on ammo for his rifle, just like he always does before he goes hunting. “He says he’s going to be away for a week,” she whispered, rolling her eyes, “as if he’s being subtle about it. I’m telling you, he’s going to go shoot some dinosaurs.”
And she was right. After a blissful, Warren-free week where my friends actually came over to my house (they refuse to when he’s around), my uncle pulled up into the driveway with a giant blue tarp covering the bed of his pickup. In the middle of the night, I watched from my window as he and his buddies unloaded heavy tarps wrapped around human-sized lumps which they then dragged into the garage. I went to Auntie Lynn’s room to let her know what was happening, but after hearing her crying through the door, I decided to return to bed.
But I couldn’t sleep. I could hear the guys outside drinking beers and laughing, doing awfully racist impressions of their co-workers. My window was two stories above the garage entrance where they were hanging out, but I still couldn’t hear much. I put on my shoes and snuck down the stairs, trying not to alert my aunt.
The foyer had a door leading to the garage, but it was blocked by the taxidermied smiledon, so no one ever used it. I sat near the paws of the stuffed cat and watched shadows move back and forth underneath the door; it seemed like they were still moving tarps around, grunting and puffing. There was an unpleasant odor that hadn’t been there before, as if the garage was full of roadkill.
“Where do I put this one?” I heard someone ask.
“Keep it,” my Uncle Warren said. “I don’t want the young; I just want the adults.”
“It's huge!” someone else exclaimed. “That thing’ll go for tens of thousands.”
“I know a guy that’ll pay me for the full body and another who just wants the head mounted,” my uncle said. “I just can’t let Lynn know about the money. She’ll want to put it towards college tuition.”
I could easily believe what I was hearing—Uncle Warren hates college-educated women—but that didn’t mean I liked what he said. If he wasn’t going to provide for me, protect me . . . why would I protect him?
Maybe it was time to do something about the dead animals in the house. I stared into the open snarl of the smilodon, counting each tooth. How much was the cat worth? My fingers ran through his tufted hair, trailed along the edge of its giant canines that could slice off my hand. Its eyes were narrowed, its brow furrowed, as if to pounce on my neck at any moment. But he was dead, as dead as the dinosaurs on the other side of the door.
The officers from Prehistoric Fish and Wildlife did not hesitate to show up. Uncle Warren definitely resisted arrest on the way out the door. He kept saying, “You don’t know anything!” even though I had already told them everything when I called the tipline. Auntie Lynn didn’t even come downstairs during his arrest; she watched from the upstairs window, hiding behind the long curtains, as he got placed in the back of the vehicle.
I let the officers into the garage to look over the corpses. Several—several!—pterosaurs were laid out on blue tarps, their giant wings wrapped around their bodies and bound with bungee cords. They rested like fallen angels, the most innocent creatures I had ever seen. Never before being able to get so close to one before without fear of losing my eyeballs, I knelt at their side, taking in every wrinkle and speckle of their skin.
“Aetodactylus,” one of the officers told me, taking pictures of the corpses. “Shame. Scary guys, but they’re real interesting. I love to watch them hunt; they fish like ospreys.”
When they were done loading up the pterosaurs on the back of their trucks, Auntie Lynn showed them all the taxidermy she knew they could seize, pulling dead animals out of linen closets that I never knew existed.
“I don’t want to spend another day looking at it,” she said, helping them take the baby mammoth head down from the wall. “If you go up in the attic, I’m sure you’ll find more. He never lets me go up there, and the door’s always locked, but there’s a sledgehammer by the tool bench you can use.”
“You sure, ma’am?” an officer asked. “I’m sure I could remove the door knob myself.”
“Break it all down!” Auntie Lynn exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “I’m leaving this house and that motherfucker who owns it!”
Auntie Lynn and I packed up what we wanted to take with us and found ourselves an affordable one-bedroom a few miles from the college I was accepted to. We were worried about money until I started working as a janitor part-time at a lab, and shortly after, she landed an office position with Prehistoric Fish and Wildlife. She hadn’t had a full-time job in a while but ended up connecting to the officers about our situation, and it was perfect timing—two weeks prior, their former office admin had been struck dead by a loose triceratops, opening up the position.
Not all of the animals were seized, and some of the taxidermy was left behind. We loaded up a truck of the remaining mounted heads, your basic deer, therapsids, and whatnot, and drove out to a taxidermist a few miles from our old home. When we walked into his store, he said he had seen us in photos before and gleefully told us he had worked on Uncle Warren’s trophies since the 90s and that the man was like family to him. We thanked him for all his beautiful work over the past decades and got paid a few thousand for the remaining taxidermy we pawned off on him. After we left, I called the Prehistoric Fish and Wildlife tipline and reported him for illegally trading animal parts.
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