My name is Tobias.

The other Animorphs can’t tell you very much about themselves, but I can. See, I don’t have an address. I can’t be found. I live in an area of forest by a meadow. That’s my territory.

My territory includes the meadow, which is maybe a hundred yards across in one direction, and half that in the other direction. My territory also includes the trees around the meadow, and the woods heading north for about another hundred yards.

Of course, my territory is also the territory of other animals. Owls, jays, foxes, raccoons, on down to ants and spiders. But no red-tailed hawks.

Except me.

My name is Tobias, and I am human. Partly. Most of my mind is human. At least I think it is. I mean, I remember human things. I can read and use language. Most of my close friends are human. And I was born a human, in a human body with arms and legs and hair and a mouth.

Now, though, I have wings and talons and feathers. And instead of a mouth I have a hooked beak.

I can make sounds with my beak. But nothing that sounds human. To speak with regular humans I use thought-speak.

But there were no people nearby right then in the early morning, as I waited patiently in the branch of a dying elm tree.

I kept my eyes focused sharply on the meadow. I knew the pathways and homes of the mice and rats and rabbits who lived there. And I knew what it meant when the tall, dry grass twitched just the smallest bit.

With my hawk’s eyes I could see what no human could hope to see. I could see the individual stalks of grass barely tremble as a mouse brushed between them.

And with my hawk’s ears I heard the faint sound of mouse teeth, chewing on a seed.

The mouse was seventy or eighty feet away. An easy target.

I opened my wings slowly, not wanting to make a sound. I released the grip of my talons on the branch and fell forward. My wings caught the cushion of air and I swooped, almost silent, toward my prey.

The grass twitched.

Through the grass I saw a flash of brown. The mouse was running.

Too slowly.

I raked my talons forward. I swept my wings forward to cancel my speed, dropped one wing to turn, and fell the last foot like a rock.

It was all over very quickly.

But this time as I dragged the mouse away to a safer spot, I stumbled on a faded magazine someone had thrown away. The wind whipped the pages by, one at a time. Advertisements. Graphs. Pictures of the president with some foreign leader.

And then one page stayed open. A photograph of a classroom. Kids my age. Some of the kids were goofing off in the back of the class. Some looked bored. Most looked more or less interested, and three were practically leaping from their seats, waving their hands for the teacher. All that, frozen in a photograph.

A classroom like any classroom. Like the classrooms I used to attend. I would have been one of the kids paying attention, but too shy to volunteer. I was never very bold or aggressive. I was a bully-magnet, to tell you the truth. The kid most likely to get pounded. The kid from the home so screwed up that I ended up being shuttled back and forth between aunts and uncles who didn’t even remember my name half the time.

But that wasn’t me anymore.