And I had other enemies in the forest to worry about. I was extremely aware of the fact that any number of other birds and various hungry mammals were noticing me and thinking maybe I'd make a nice snack.

But I was riding atop a Hork-Bajir. And none

of the forest predators could quite figure out how to deal with that.

At one point a pair of wolves, probably scouting for their pack, stood a few dozen yards away and watched us pass.

Wolves are very smart animals. They didn't know what the Hork-Bajir were. But they knew for sure they didn't want to mess with them.

Deer scampered away from us. Owls dismissed us. We were obviously not mice, and that's all the owls cared about. Foxes slunk away. Raccoons froze. Only the forest's most fearless creature ignored us and went on about its business.

In fact, I had to stop Ket Halpak from stepping on one.

"Stop! Stop! Nobody move!" I yelled, having seen the warning stripes of this most fearsome animal.

"Yeerks?" Jara Hamee responded.

"Taxxons?" Ket Halpak asked fearfully.

"No. Worse. A skunk. Just let it go on its way. Nobody move a muscle till it's gone."

"Hah! Small animal! Not kill Jara Hamee!"

"No, it won't kill you. It'll just make you wish you were dead."

I didn't know how much ground we had covered by the time we finally took a rest. I can't judge distances on the ground very well anymore. All I knew was that the sky was a shade lighter than absolute black. And the Hork-Bajir had

started to stumble a lot. They were beat. And I was starving.

"Do you need something to eat?" I asked the two Hork-Bajir.

"We eat," Jara Hamee agreed. Without any delay, he walked over to a tree. A pine of some sort. He drew back and slashed at the tree trunk with his elbow blade.

SCCCRRAAACK!

He sliced it straight up, opening about a three-foot gash in the bark.

With his wrist blade, he began to slice the bark away in chunks ranging from a few inches long to almost a foot square.

He tossed slabs of the stripped bark to his mate and took some for himself.

"That's what you eat?"

"Yes."

"ls that how you eat back on your own world?"

He chewed the bark and seemed to be looking far off. "When Jara Hamee small, Jara Hamee eat from the Kanver. Eat from the Lewhak. Eat from the tali Fit Fit."

"Are those all trees? I mean, are they like these trees?"

"Better," Ket Halpak said.

"Better," Jara Hamee agreed.

I got the feeling Jara thought he might have

insulted me by dissing Earth trees. "Earth tree good," he added.

"Earth tree good," Ket Halpak agreed.

It made me smile inside. There were times when my life was just so utterly insane I could only laugh. A pair of goblins from some far-distant planet were worried they'd hurt my feelings because they didn't like pine bark.

Then, like a light going off in my head, I realized something. "Jara, Ket? Is that why Hork-Bajir have blades? To strip the bark from trees?" Ket Halpak stood up. I was sitting on a rotting log, so she towered above me like a skyscraper. She pointed to her elbow blade. "For straight cut." Indicating her wrist blade, she said, "For taking off."

Sticking out her knee, she explained, "For down by ground."

"For the bottom of trees," I said. "Each of the blades has a special use. Each one is for harvesting tree bark."

"Yes."

She sat back down and took another chunk of bark.

"They aren't weapons? You don't use them to defend yourselves from enemies? To kill prey?"

Jara Hamee looked right at me. "Hork-Bajir have no enemy. No prey.

Hork-Bajir not kill.

Yeerk kill. Yeerk kill Andaiite. Andalite kill Yeerk. Hork-Bajirdie."

"You're caught in the middle. But that's why the Yeerks took over your race - the blades. They made you deadly, once the Yeerk evil was in your head. You're the ultimate soldiers. All because you're adapted to eating tree bark."

The Hork-Bajir had nothing else to say. They went back to eating.

"Look, I have to go for a while. I ... um, I have to go get food, too." Ket Halpak held out a chunk of bark. "Our food yours."

"Thanks. But I need a different food."

I didn't tell them what I ate or how I got it.

You know, it's strange. I never feel guilty about being a predator when I'm with humans. After all, good old Homo sapiens is the king of all predators.

But these deadly looking Hork-Bajir were not predators at all. Despite their looks, they were no more dangerous than a deer with a large rack of antlers.

They were just victims. Just a species that had the bad luck to look fearsome. And now they were caught up in a war between Yeerks and the rest of the free species of the galaxy.

I thought of all the battles we'd had with

Hork-Bajir. They had come close to killing me more than once. I had hated and feared them. Now I just felt sorry for them.

And I felt sorrier still, because I knew that my friends and I would fight against Hork-Bajir again in the future.

"l'll be back in half an hour or so," I said as I took wing. "Don't worry. I won't leave you."

s I flew up through the trees, I saw the sun just peeking up over the rim of the earth in the east. It instantly lit the treetops with gold.

It was a beautiful sight. Golden leaves and dark shadows beneath, and clouds all red on one side and still night-gray on the other.

It felt good to be up off the ground. It felt good to have air beneath my wings and a cold clean breeze in my face. I'd spent the night clinging to a Hork-Bajir's horns and slogging through the brush. That was no place for a bird. Or even for a human in bird shape.

The air was still flat, no thermals, no up-drafts, so I had to work hard. But it felt good,