And I was getting ready to be one again.

We reached the edge of the forest. It began very suddenly. One step was on grass, the next step was on pine needles and fallen leaves. It was darker under the trees. And as we walked into the forest it grew darker still. I craned my neck back. Looking up, I could still see blue sky overhead. But the sun was going down, and night was growing near. Creatures of the day were winding down their activities, and creatures of the night were opening their eyes.

"Might as well morph now," Marco said.

"Yes. We'll move faster in wolf morph," I agreed.

He grinned at me. "Does it ever creep you out? All this morphing, I mean? I still remember the first time. It was so bizarre."

"It's still bizarre," I said.

"Even for you?"

"Why not for me?" I asked.

Marco shrugged. "You're the morphing queen."

I laughed. "Oh please. We all morph."

"Yeah, but even Ax says you have some kind of special talent. Like you have more control or whatever. He says you're even better than he is."

"That doesn't make it any less creepy for me," I said. "I mean, we're in the forest, the sun is going down, and I'm getting ready to turn into a wolf. This could be a horror movie."

"Wolfman."

"Wolfwoman," I corrected.

"The Wolf Couple."

We shoved our outer clothing under some brush, and I began to morph. I focused my mind on the wolf whose DNA was a part of me. Marco and I were actually the identical wolf. We had both absorbed the DNA of the same female.

18 I felt my jaw stretching and stretching outward. The bones made a slight grinding sound as my small, weak human mouth became the powerful, crushing jaw of the wolf. My human mouth and teeth could barely cut through a tough steak. The wolf jaw and teeth could tear the throat out of a living, struggling deer.

My gums itched as my teeth grew longer.

"See? Thrat's whuk I mearrrn," Marco said, trying to make sounds even as his human tongue and lips disappeared. In a few more seconds he was able to switch to thought-speak.

"See? That's what I mean. Look at how much better you are at morphing than I am. That looks very creepy, by the way. "

I had controlled the morphing so that the wolf's head appeared completely formed before anything else happened. I was a completely normal girl with just the downiest growth of fur and a massive, shaggy wolf's head atop my shoulders.

"I didn't really think much about it," I said. "Sometimes my brain just seems to have its own ideas about morphing."

The rest of the morph continued. My knees reversed direction. My legs grew smaller. Rough pads replaced my feet. The fur on my body grew long and rough and grayish in color.

I fell forward onto my front legs, no longer able to stand.

The wolf's instincts began to surface, but I had done this morph before, so I could handle them easily.

Then the wolf's senses came on, replacing my human perception.

The forest was an entirely different experience to the wolf. It was as if I had been transported instantly to some totally different place.

My human ears had noticed almost nothing -- a bit of wind, a few chirps, the rustling of leaves. But the wolf's ears heard everything. They heard some large, four-footed animal about a hundred yards to the right. They heard squirrels gnawing acorns in their high nests. They heard insects crawling beneath the pine-needle floor. They heard cars on the far-distant road.

And the ears were nothing, compared to the sense of smell.

Let me just put it this way -- in terms of smell, all humans are blind. We smell nothing.

Maybe we smell a flower if it's right under our nose, or a chocolate cake baking in the oven.

But we are the morons of smell. Wolves are the geniuses of smell. You have no idea. No idea at all what it is like to have that wolf nose.

"Ahhh!" I cried in shock.

"Yeah," Marco agreed. "I'd forgotten. Wow. Hello!"

It is exactly like being blind and then, all of a sudden, being able to see.

19 The wolf smelled the horses in our field. The wolf didn't just smell that they were horses, it smelled that they were fully grown and healthy. The wolf smelled every flower, every tree, every leaf, every mushroom. It smelled water in three different locations and knew which stream was sweetest.

The wolf smelled a chipmunk, a dozen squirrels, voles, rats, mice, deer, a dead sparrow, a raccoon, no ... two raccoons.

And it smelled me.

I mean, it smelled my scent from the clothing I had just morphed out of. It smelled the scent of all the birds and animals in my barn that I had touched or even walked near.

It smelled things that were three days old. The human who had walked through these woods days before. The other wolf, an old male, who had passed by. The smell of dogs and cats and trash.

And one very strange smell that I realized had to be the scent of an Andalite -- Ax.

When you put it all together in your head -- the sense of smell and the hearing -- it was as if the entire world around you was crawling and seething and exploding with life.

"Cool," Marco said.

"Way cool," I agreed.

"Let's go. Let's run. "

Wolves like to run.

20 Chapter Five

Wolves can run. Wolves can run all through the night, without stopping or slowing or taking a break.

We ran, Marco and I, jumping fallen logs, swerving through trees, and skirting patches of thorns. Across sunset-lit meadows, and through dark stands of tall pines. We splashed happily through streams and skittered across rocks.

We were running on sensation, our heads swimming with smell and sound and sight. There was nothing within a thousand yards that we didn't know about. We were plugged into the data stream of nature itself.

We smelled the logging camp long before we reached it. Then we heard the sounds of machines. And we heard the murmurs of conversation. Human voices.

Then we got a reminder that we were not the only hyper-alert predators in the forest.

"Is that you guys?" a thought-speak voice asked. Jake's voice.

"Yes. Where are you?" I asked.

"Way up above you," Jake said with a laugh. I stopped running and craned my head back like I was going to howl at the moon. Through a break in the trees I saw a patch of sky. And way, way up in that sky, I saw three tiny black dots.

Tobias and Jake, floating a quarter-mile up. Even in the weakening light they had seen us from clear up in the bellies of the clouds.

"The place is just ahead. Lots of heavy equipment. Guards. But go take a look. Just be careful."

"We'd hang out, but the sun's going down and we won't be able to see much more anyway," Tobias remarked.

"You saw us," I said, a bit grumpily.

Tobias laughed. "Yeah, but you're a pair of great big wolves. That's not much of a challenge.

Now, that flea crawling by your ear. . ."

"You can't see a flea," I said.

"Heh, heh, heh," Tobias answered. "Can't I?"

Marco and I started moving forward again, but slower than before. More cautiously. Through the trees we began to see light. Artificial light.

We crept slowly nearer, shoulders hunched, heads low, ears aimed forward, sniffing the wind for clues.

21 The command center building was bigger than it had looked at first. It was made of logs, like some kind of rustic ranger station. It was two stories tall, with a porch on the front.

On the back-and-side ground levels there were no windows. None at all. There were windows on the upper level, but they were dark. Too dark for me to see into.