The Change by K.A. Applegate

Author:K.A. Applegate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2017-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

It was a long night. I can tell you that for sure. A very long night. Even the Hork-Bajir were worn out by the time the first faint gray of predawn started to appear.

The whole time I was waiting to see a bunch of Taxxons suddenly show up, followed by heavily armed Hork-Bajir. Or else Visser Three in one of his awful morphs. Every shadow looked like it could be an enemy.

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.”

<Is 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 tall 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.

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