Текст книги "Animorphs - 09 - The Secret"

Автор книги: Katherine Alice Applegate

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"Rachel," I called. "Marco. Ax. "

"I . . . " It was Rachel's thought-speak voice. "I ... I ... Oh, no. No! No!"

"Rachel! It's the queen. She's controlling you," I said.

"I can't... my body ... it just. . ."

"Marco! Marco can you hear me? Marco!"

"She's got me. I can't say no. I can't stop!" he cried in anguished response.

My own body motored away on its six legs. I fell in step behind two workers. Each was 51 carrying one of the gooey, precious eggs. I had to protect them. There might be enemies. We walked along the grotesque length of the queen. Toward her head.

Ants. They were the enemy. Sometimes they came. Sometimes they poured down the tunnels, looking for the eggs, to carry them off for food.

Sometimes they attacked the queen herself. The soldiers fought them. The soldiers sometimes died fighting them.

"The queen!" Rachel's voice said. "The only way . . . destroy the queen. " It was like an electric jolt in my mind! Get rid of the queen! Yes. The only way. They wouldn't be expecting that. There would be no one to stop me!

But my body was not my own. I could not make it...

The two workers plodded along before me. I could feel their hind ends with my feelers. And I knew the queen's head was just to my right. Just a half inch. Less.

The queen's head . . . feelers . . . eyes . . . like an ant!

One chance . . . focus . . . focus ... I had to trick the termite mind. I had to draw on every ounce of my strength.

If I failed, I would live out the rest of my life as a mindless slave of the termite queen. Now!

Do it now!

I swerved right. It was like moving through molasses. The queen had ordered me to go after the workers, and I was disobeying.

Ant! Ant!I screamed the word in my own head. Ant! Destroy! Destroy! Destroy the ant!

I clambered over a half dozen termites who were tending the queen. I could feel my will weakening. I couldn't get rid of the queen. I had to kill an ant.

That was my purpose – to keep ants away from the queen.

I scampered toward the queen's head. I felt my antennae touch her. I opened my massive pincerjaws. . . .

Termites ran around insanely. They were racing, out of control, lost, confused. For a moment I did the same. The queen was gone.

I think in some way I wanted to forget who I was. What I had done. I wanted to become one of the lost, panicked termites.

"We're free! We're out! Cassie, where are you? Get out of there!" I heard a far-off voice cry.

Was it Ax? Marco? Rachel?

"Demorph!" I cried with my last shred of control.

52 "No! Cassie, no!" a voice screamed in my head. "You're inside a piece of wood!"

"Demorph!" I screamed again. Human. I wanted to be human again. Let me be human! Let me out of this place. Out of this body.

I grew. Walls pressed in around me. I filled the tunnel. I couldn't grow anymore!

Trapped! Pain. Nothing but pain! I was a swollen, vast termite. Larger than any queen.

Huge.

I couldn't grow anymore. And I couldn't stop. I was trying to become human again, to fit a human body into a space no bigger than the inside of a walnut.

Then . . . explosion!

The walls opened up. Splinters! Fresh air rushed across my hard termite skin. My head was free of the wood and growing. But my body was still trapped. Squeezing with terrible pain.

I had eyes now. They could see, but only dimly. I was still tiny, and in the air above me a huge blade as long as a passenger jet slashed downward. The wood splintered again and my body was free. I grew and grew. Arms . . . legs ... my own head.

I was on my knees on a wooden floor. Marco and Rachel stood over me. Ax had used his tail to slice open the wood. They had all escaped the colony. They had demorphed.

It was dark in the room, but there were glowing red-and-green indicator lights. And there was a computer monitor showing neat screen-saver triangles floating and reforming.

"Are you okay?" Rachel asked. She bent down and put her hand on my shoulder.

I gave her a hug. Then, just as suddenly, I pushed her away. "Let me go! Don't touch me!

Don't touch me! DON'T TOUCH ME!"

Rachel was on me in a flash. She clamped her hand over my mouth. Marco grabbed my ankles and held them still.

"Cassie!" Rachel hissed. "Shut up. We're inside the Yeerk building. We're in a side room, but we can hear people in the next room!"

I was beyond caring. I struggled and fought and tried to scream.

"Ax, whatever you can do with that computer, do it!" Marco whispered urgently.

Rachel and Marco held me pinned against the floor. And slowly . . . very slowly ... my bunched muscles relaxed. I stopped fighting.

"Are you okay now?" Rachel asked.

Okay? I would never be okay again. But I nodded my head anyway. Rachel took her hand away from my mouth.

53 "It's over, Cassie," Marco said. "You saved us. It's over. And we have other problems now."

"I'm good," I said. "I'm fine." But my skin was crawling. Evil, terrible memories were crowding in on me.

"I have access," Ax said. "Accessing. Urn ... Marco or Rachel, I need a human to help me understand the meaning of what I am seeing here."

Marco climbed up off the floor. Rachel stayed with me. She was stroking my hair, like my mom would have done if I'd had a nightmare.

It was hard to think of Rachel as being nurturing. But she did the right thing.

I heard sounds in the next room. Human voices. And Hork-Bajir, speaking their weird mix of their own native tongue and human speech they'd learned for duty on Earth.

"Some kind of commission," Marco mused, looking at the computer screen. "Three members.

They vote on what happens to the forest. They decide if the logging can go forward."

"Dapsen Lumber Company," Ax said. "That's what the Yeerks call this logging company.

Very funny. "

"What's funny?" Marco asked.

"Dapsen. It's a Yeerkish word that means . . . well. Never mind what it means. It isn't polite.

"

"Look at this document," Marco whispered. "Preliminary permission to examine feasibility of. . . " Hey. The Yeerks don't have final permission to begin logging. There's this commission that still has to decide. Three people. One has already said yes. Probably a Controller. One has voted definitely no. There's one guy left. Some guy named Farrand.

Yikes!"

"What yikes?" Rachel asked.

"Yikes, as in he's coming for a visit to check the scene," Marco said. "End of the week. Then he'll vote. If that guy votes yes, the Yeerks are in business and we're in trouble."

"He'll vote yes," Rachel said darkly.

"I'm afraid that is true," Ax agreed. "The Yeerks will make him a Controllers "Not if we stop them," Marco said.

"One thing at a time. We need to get out of here," Rachel said. "And we're not going back out the way we came in."

No one argued with that.

54 "I am making a slight change in the programming that may let me access this computer from Marco's home computer. And I can temporarily shut down the defenses from this computer," Ax said.

"But there are still guards outside. And Hork-Bajir in the next room. "

"Yeah. We'll have to move fast," Rachel said. "Cassie, can you morph? Can you morph the wolf? I'll stay right beside you the whole time."

Could I morph? The very idea made me sick. But even in my quaking fear I knew anything was better than going back down into that termite colony.

Five minutes later, Ax turned off the outer defenses, and we ran from that building.

I guess the Yeerks counted on their high-tech defenses too much. Without them, no one even shouted an alarm. By sheer, dumb luck we raced between the paths of two Controller guards.

No one yelled. No one fired a shot. We ran into the woods where Jake joined up with us.

No one said much on the way home.

55 Chapter fourteen

My parents expected me to be at Rachel's house. Her parents expected her to sleep over at my house. My house was easier to sneak into, so that's where we went.

It was almost dawn by the time we de-morphed. We crept through my dark living room and up to my room, trying not to make the stairs squeak.

I loaned Rachel a big flannel shirt. She grabbed a blanket and a pillow and simply fell down on the floor beside my bed. I think she was asleep before she landed.

I crawled into my bed. My own, familiar bed. The sheets were cool. The comforter was my comforter. I belonged here. This was my place. And yet nothing seemed familiar. The shadows cast by dim starlight on the walls . . . the shapes of shirts and overalls hung from big hooks on the walls ... the bindings of books I'd read, right here in this room . . . none of it seemed real.

I closed my eyes, then opened them quickly.

How could it be? How could I remember what that chamber looked like, what the termite queen looked like when I'd had no eyes? But still, I remembered it all. I saw the chamber dug from the rotted wood by hundreds of workers. And I saw the huge queen.

I felt my pincers.

I hadn't just destroyed her. I had destroyed the entire colony. I had done it to save myself and my friends.

I wanted to throw up. But I would have had to get out of bed to run to the bathroom. And I felt like I never wanted to leave that bed again.

I love animals. I've been raised all my life around them. I love nature. But what did I really know about it?

I have been more animals than many people ever see in a lifetime. I have flown with the wings of an osprey. I've raced through the ocean in the body of a dolphin. I've seen the world through the eyes of an owl at night, and smelled the wind with all the keen senses of a wolf.

I've flown upside down and backward in the body of a fly. Sometimes I go out into the far fields at night and become a horse and run through the grass.

And everything I've been, every animal, is either killer or killed.

In a million, million battles all around the world, on every continent, in every square inch of space, there was killing. From the great cats in Africa that cold-bloodedly search out the young and weak gazelles, to the terrible wars that are fought out in anthills and termite colonies.

All of nature was at war.

And, at the top of all that destruction, humans killed each other as well as other species, and now those same people have been enslaved and destroyed by the Yeerks.

56 Nature at its finest. Cute, cuddly animals who slaughtered to live. The color of nature wasn't green. It was red. Blood-red.

I realized tears were running down my cheeks and soaking my pillow. I would have cried out loud, but I didn't want Rachel to wake up. I would have screamed but my parents would have come running. And what could I have told them? Lies. More lies. Because in my world, I, too, was prey. The Yeerks were hunting me. I was scared. I was alone. I didn't know what was going to happen to me.

And then I thought of the lost skunk kits. Unlovable little creatures, to most people. But they were scared and alone, too. If they were still alive.

I guess I fell asleep eventually, because I dreamed. It wasn't a nightmare, though. It wasn't even about the termite world.

I was a mother. In my dream I was a mother, looking for her babies. I searched everywhere, even though I was hurt and in pain.

At last I found them. And, in my dream, they snuggled next to me.

When I woke up, the dream quickly evaporated. But it left behind a feeling of peace.

The sun was high in the sky. It was ten-fifteen in the morning. Late. Rachel had already showered and dressed.

"I can't believe you slept so well," Rachel grumbled. "I had a seriously bad nightmare. Look, I gotta get home. Are you okay?"

"Sure," I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. "I mean . . . you know, last night and all ... it wasn't like I was having some kind of breakdown or anything. It's just, you know. It creeped me out."

"Tell me about it," Rachel agreed. "But it's really no big deal if you think about it, Cassie.

Termites get killed all the time. They were just termites. Bugs."

"Yeah."

She left. I don't know if she just had to get home, or if I made her uncomfortable. Rachel isn't usually a huggy kind of person. Having to treat me like a baby probably gave her the willies.

My mom was at work. My dad was off somewhere, I guess, because his truck was gone. 1 made some toast and drank some orange juice. Then I ate a piece of leftover veggie pizza.

I felt restless and weird. Like I was on the edge of something. Like life had gotten unbalanced since the day before.

"Rachel's right," I said out loud, just to hear a voice. "They're bugs. Termites. And besides, I got away in the end."

57 I walked outside to feel the sun on my skin. My human skin. Without really thinking much about it, I went into the barn to the refrigerator we use to store perishable food for the animals. I took out a frozen grasshopper and stuck it in my pocket. And then I headed toward the edge of the forest.

"Hey, Cassie," a thought-speak voice said as I crunched noisily through the woods. "What's going on?"

I looked up and saw Tobias go skimming by. He flared, turned on a dime, and landed on a branch. He dug his ripping talons into the soft bark.

"Not much," I said.

"I heard it was pretty bad last night. "

"Yeah? Who did you talk to?"

"Ax. Who else? He was definitely weirded out by the whole thing. " I stopped walking. It was something in the way he said "weirded out." "Tobias, who else did you talk to?"

"Maybe Marco," he said.

"And Marco told you I went nuts, right?"

"Actually, the word he used was "insane." Also "Looney Tunes." And "wacko." But he meant it all in the nicest possible way. "

I laughed bitterly. "Well, I guess I did go a bit wacko," I said.

"Welcome to the club," Tobias said. "None of us is going to come through all this completely normal. You know that. Too much fear. "

"Well, I'm pretty sick of it," I said. "I had to destroy the termite queen. I know, she was just a bug. But you know, who am I to decide that it's okay to kill one animal and not another? Here I am, the big Earth Mother, tree-hugger, animal-lover, as Marco would say, and when it gets down to it, I'm just like ..."

"Just like me?" Tobias asked.

"Just like any predator," I said lamely.

"You feel bad because you had to kill the queen in order to survive. "

"I shouldn't have been there. It's their world, not mine. Those little tunnels in a rotten piece of wood – that's their whole universe. I invaded it. And when they got in my way, I reacted.

Who does that remind you of?"

"Look, you are not a Yeerk, and termites are not human beings," Tobias said. less-than 58 There's no comparison."

I didn't bother arguing. "Look, I have to morph. There's something I need to do."

"What?"

I sighed. "It's something stupid, all right? There's this mother skunk we have who's injured.

She has a litter of kits who are going to die. I think I know where they are, more or less, but I can't get there walking like a human."

For a moment Tobias said nothing. less-than Skunk kits? Near the edge of the Yeerk logging compound?"

"Yes."

"I can show you where they are. "

For a frozen moment of time I refused to understand what he'd just said. I didn't want to think of why Tobias . . . why a red-tailed hawk would know the exact location of a litter of skunk babies.

I took a couple of deep breaths. I tried to keep my voice level. "Are they still alive?"

"There are four still alive," Tobias said.

I felt an emotion I don't feel very often. I felt it boiling up inside me. I glared furiously at him. At the ripping talons. At the nastily curved beak.

I could picture the scene in my mind. The way he would have swooped down, raked those talons forward, snatched the defenseless kit off the ground and . . .

I was shaking. I laced my fingers together, just to stop them from trembling.

"I'm going to save what's left of them," I said. My voice didn't sound like my voice.

"I'll help you," Tobias said.

59 Chapter FIFTEEN

I used my osprey morph and flew behind Tobias as he led me directly to the spot I had seen the night before. I carried the frozen grasshopper in my talons. I didn't ask Tobias any questions, and he didn't say anything.

He pointed out the almost-invisible entrance to the skunks' lair. And then he flew away. I knew he'd go to Jake and tell him what I was doing. And I knew that I had hurt Tobias by treating him so coldly.

But, to tell you the truth, I didn't care right then. I just wanted to find those baby skunks. I don't know why, but somehow in my mind those baby skunks had become very important.

When Tobias was out of sight, I began to morph.

It wasn't a difficult morph. I kept eyes and ears and a mouth all the way through the change.

Not like becoming a bug.

There was the now-familiar sensation of shrinking. And there was the surprise of having a huge, bushy tail growing from the base of my spine. But I had morphed a squirrel before.

This was pretty close.

But the fur was a new experience. Oh, I'd grown fur before, but never any so long and luxurious and dramatic. This was a regular fur coat, so to speak. Mostly black, but with an impressive swipe of white down my back and into my tail.

The senses of the skunk were nothing dramatic. The hearing was a little better than human, maybe. The sense of smell was good. The sight not as good as my own human vision.

And the skunk's body was not swift or strong. I shuffled and sort of waddled when I tried to walk. When I tried to run I just ended up waddling a little more.

My front paws could grasp and hold things, but they were far inferior to my own human hands.

It was the skunk's mind and instincts that seemed strangest of all. I've been inside minds that were all fear, or all hunger. Minds that were keyed up, like they lived on adrenaline.

But this mind, this package of instincts, was so ... gentle. So unafraid. Not cocky and swaggering like a big cat, just unafraid.

I was an animal no bigger than a house cat. No sharp teeth or talons. And yet just about nothing in the forest messed with me. 1 felt the gentleness of absolute confidence.

I could hear the mewing sounds of the skunk kits within the burrow.

I waddled over to the opening and pushed my head inside. It was dark, but I could make out four of them. Tiny, helpless little things. No longer infants, but not yet able to defend themselves or hunt like skunks.

I know some people think animals don't have emotions. But those kits were happy to see me.

And something in the mind of the skunk was relieved and joyful to see them.

60 I retrieved the frozen grasshopper, now completely thawed. I crawled inside that little hole in the dirt. I curled around, and the kits nuzzled up against me. I fed them the grasshopper.

I knew I only had two hours in morph. But even though I had just gotten up a few hours earlier, I suddenly felt sleepy. The meal was done. The kits wouldn't starve. And I was sleepy and very, very peaceful.

Even in my sleep I knew what was happening to me. See, I had always loved animals.

Always. But now, I think was falling out of love.

Nature wasn't all cute and fuzzy. The strong ate the weak. The weak ate the weaker. It's what the Yeerks were doing: trying to make prey out of the ultimate predator, Homo sapiens.

WHUMP!

"Hey! Hey! Are you in there? Cassie!"

I woke up. Where was I? It was dark. Was I in my bedroom? Was I ... oh, no, was I in the termite colony?!

The four kits still slept, curled up against me. I was in the skunks' den.

"What?" I said.

"It's me, Jake, Cassie, get out of there. Now! You've been in morph for almost two hours!"

That woke me up all the way. I shot out of the burrow and instantly began to demorph.

Jake was standing there with Marco. Tobias was in the tree overhead.

I have seen Jake mad before. But I'd never seen him this mad. "What did you think you were doing?!" he yelled, without even waiting for me to become human. "You were ten minutes away from spending the rest of your life as a skunk!"

"I fell asleep," I said. My mouth wasn't formed yet.

"Are you out of your mind? What is the matter with you?" I'd never noticed that Jake has this vein that kind of pops out on his forehead when he's furious.

"Look, I'm sorry," I mumbled, as I finished demorphing.

He was a long way from forgiving me. "This is not why we have this ability. We are not trying to save every lost skunk in the world," Jake ranted. "We are an army. A small, weak, pathetic, outnumbered army. We have exactly six members. Tobias has already been trapped in morph. But he was trapped fighting the Yeerks. I can't believe you would nearly get yourself trapped in morph over some skunks!"

Marco stepped in and put a hand on Jake's shoulder and kind of pulled him back. "Look, it's okay, Jake. She's okay."

"Thanks to Tobias," Jake snapped. "No thanks to her."

61 I didn't know what to say. I was too shocked. And to be honest, I was pretty horrified by what I'd almost done.

"Marco. Tobias. Take a walk, okay?" Jake said. Then he turned and stood with his face just inches from mine. "I know you had a real bad experience last night. I've been there. I've had the nightmares. I know what's going on in your head right now."

"I'm fine," I muttered.

"Just shut up and listen to me," he said. But the anger was gone now. "I care about you, Cassie.

We all do. And we all need you."

"To win?" I said. "You need me to fight battles? What if I don't want to fight any more battles? What if I've had enough? I've done enough."

"You've done far more than enough. A hundred times more than enough. But the Yeerks are still here."

I shrugged. "The strong eat the weak," I said. "It's part of nature. Humans always win, other animals always lose. Maybe it's our turn to lose."

Jake nodded. "This isn't about some race called humans. It's about people we know. People we see every day. My brother, Tom, is one of them. So why don't you go tell Tom it's okay that he's a slave of the Yeerks because it's our turn to get hammered?"

He turned and walked away.

"Jake?"

He stopped.

"Jake? Urn ... my dad will have the skunk mother ready to be returned here in a day or so. I'm not going to just abandon these kits."

He put his hands on his hips and glared at me. "You can't stay in morph that long, and you know it."

"I know. But I have to make sure no predators come around. I have to get them food. And I have to morph at least some of the time, so they can imprint on their mother here in the wild.

Look ... I know it seems stupid to you and Marco and probably everyone. But I have to do this."

"I'll watch them," Tobias said.

I'd forgotten how good hawk hearing is.

"Tobias will keep watch. We'll work something out," Jake said. "We'll save the lousy skunks.

After all, it's not like we have anything else to do. Aside from saving the world."

62 "Thanks, Jake," I said. "And . . . sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. I'll be okay now, I think."

He smiled his slow smile. "I'll be okay, too, Cassie. As long as you're around."

From a little ways off to our left I heard Marco make a loud gagging noise. It made me laugh.

I must have been feeling better, to be able to laugh.

63 Chapter Sixteen

Well, this is more than slightly insane," Marco said. It was later that same day, Sunday evening. We were all gathered around the skunks' den.

"We're going to raise little, stinky skunk babies?"

"What's so insane about that?" Rachel asked sharply. Good old Rachel. She thought it was ridiculous, too. But she's my best friend, and always backs me up.

"They're skunks," Marco said, looking from Rachel to Jake to Ax, like he was the only normal person in a mental ward.

"They're cute," Rachel said, glaring at Marco and generally looking like a girl who never used the word "cute."

"Ah. I see. "Cute." Well that certainly explains everything."

Jake cut in. "Cassie can't take them to the clinic or they may get used to humans. They're young. They'll imprint. So we are taking care of these . . . these skunks . . . until mommy skunk can come back from the hospital."

"Are skunks a sacred animal to humans?" Ax asked. "All animals are sacred to Cassie,"

Marco said. "She's Doctor Doolittle and that animal guy who comes on Letterman all rolled into one."

"But you eat some animals," Ax pointed out. "Cows, pigs, sheep, dogs. "

"We don't eat dogs!" I said.

"In some countries they do. I read it in the World Almanac." We had given Ax a World Almanac to help him learn about Earth. Ever since then, he'd become an expert on useless information.

He could tell you the per capita income of Tanzania, or the long jump record at the Olympics.

"Well, we don't eat dogs in this country," Rachel said.

"Do you eat cats?"

"Um . . . excuse me?" Jake interrupted. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was obviously getting a headache. I could understand why. "Look, here's the deal: We are about three hundred yards from the edge of the Yeerk logging compound. They have sensors, they have guards. Tobias is up top keeping an eye out, so we're safe for now. But we can't get careless.

Cassie, tell them what we want to do."

"Okay, while we're in school tomorrow and the next day, Ax and Tobias will protect the den.

Ax will morph the mother skunk from time to time. Tobias will patrol from above. I'll bring Tobias frozen food so he doesn't have to hunt during that time."

64 "Oooh, Lean Cuisine Frozen Mouse entrees," Marco teased.

"I heard that," Tobias said from somewhere up above the treetops.

"I know," Marco said, grinning smugly.

"Then, after school and through the night, the rest of us will work shifts. I'll do most of the skunk morphing, but in between times we'll have to have Jake and Rachel and Marco to help keep up a patrol."

Marco held up his hand.

"Yes, Marco?" I asked.

"Do we get some "Save the Skunks" T-shirts and bumper stickers?"

"No one has to do this," I said. "Look ... I know it seems stupid."

"Nah, it's not stupid," Marco said. "Let's see, I'm behind in my homework. My dad thinks I've joined a gang because I'm never around. I don't sleep much because every time I try I'm suddenly a termite again and I wake up screaming. I never get to just sit around and watch TV. And, in my spare time, I have to help figure out how we're going to keep the Yeerks from turning some guy named Farrand into a Controller so they can wipe out the forest and hunt down the Bird-boy and the universe's only almanac-reading Andalite. I mean, I knew the middle-school years would be tough, but this is a little much."

Jake gave Marco a long, skeptical look. "So, in other words, you'll be glad to help."

For once, it was Jake who made everyone laugh. Even Marco.

Marco shrugged. "You know, actually it's kind of a relief finding out Cassie is crazy. We know Rachel's nuts. We know I'm crazy. Cassie's been the only sane one for so long.

Welcome to the loony bin, Cassie. Save the skunks! Hug the trees! Let dogs vote!"

The others all laughed. I laughed a little, too. Marco always made fun of my being an environmentalist. Usually it was okay, because I knew what I believed in.

But now his humor cut just a little deeper.

I wasn't saving the whales or the panda or the spotted owl. I was saving a handful of skunks.

There were plenty of skunks in the world. They weren't exactly endangered.

It all went back to the termite queen. A bug. I had killed a bug, and for some reason, that had shaken my deepest faith.

Maybe Marco was right. Maybe I was crazy.

65 Chapter SEVENTEEN

Over the next two days we protected and nurtured a foursome of baby skunks. And as impossible as it seems, it worked. More or less.

Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I think the others started enjoying it, too. Typically, it was Marco who decided, after his first shift guarding the skunks, that the kits needed names.

"Joey, Johnny, Marky, and C.j.," he announced, like it was obvious. "The Ramones. The godfathers of punk rock. They would be honored. The one with the white stripe that kind of goes really wide? That's Joey. Now, Johnny ..."

At first, I was the only one to morph the skunk mother. Then Ax did it. Then the others, one by one. I almost felt jealous.

Right after school three days later, I went to the skunk burrow and found Tobias flying cover above the burrow.

"Hi, Cassie. "

"How's it going, Tobias?"

"Well, we had a little excitement. A hungry badger stopped by to check things out. But I chased him off. "

"So the kits are all right?"

"There are still four of them, if that's what you mean," Tobias answered. "But they won't stay inside. They keep coming out and looking around. Especially Marky. This isn't good.

Especially if they do it at night. "

I morphed into the skunk mother and crawled inside the den. Tobias was right – the kits were restless. They were growing fast, and they instinctively wanted to go out into the great big world beyond the burrow.

"I think I'm going to take them for a walk," I told Tobias.

"Is that a good idea?"

"Sure. Why not? You should take a break. Stretch your wings. " Tobias was relieved to have an excuse to take off. But as soon as he was gone I started to have doubts about my brilliant idea of taking the kits out for a stroll. How could I keep track of them? What if they wandered off? But then, while I was debating, Marky made a wild dash outside and I had to scamper to catch up to him. As soon as I appeared, though, the kit went meekly to stand behind me. One by one, the other three babies came out. And to my amazement, they lined up like obedient first-graders.

"Okay," I said, although of course the kits couldn't understand me. "Let's take a walk. " I waddled slowly away, took about ten steps, then turned to look back over my shoulder. The four of them were all lined up behind me. I was their mother, as far as they knew. And they were programmed to follow their mother. I waddled off, feeling a little strange but happy.

66 We walked that way for half an hour. We paused to sniff things from time to time. Various animal scents, mostly. And then, I realized something. We weren't supposed to just be going for a stroll. The kits were hungry. I was their mother. And it was my job to provide for them.

If I didn't teach them to catch bugs, they wouldn't survive. Skunks eat some plants, but they also eat crickets and mantises and grass hoppers and even shrews and mice.

I stopped walking and looked back at "my" kits. Four almost identical little balls of black-and-white fuzz. Four curious little faces watching me. Waiting to see what I was doing. Eager to learn.