The Encounter by K. A. Applegate Read Free Book Online

see it. I was hungry. I clutched the dish with my left talon and pried the lid off with my hooked beak.
    Meat and potatoes and green beans. The meat was hamburger. I don’t know how he arranged to get the food. His mom probably thought he was sneaking scraps to his dog, Homer.
    I hadn’t told him yet, but I couldn’t eat the vegetables or the potatoes. My system couldn’t deal with much except meat. I … the hawk … was a predator. In the wild, hawks live on rat and squirrel and rabbit.
    I ate some of the hamburger. It was cold. It was dead. It made me feel bad to be eating it, but it filled me up.
    But it wasn’t dead meat that I wanted. I wanted
live
meat. I wanted living, breathing, scurrying prey. I wanted to swoop down on it and grab it with my razor talons and tear into it.
    That’s what I wanted. What the hawk wanted. And when it came to food, it was hard to denythe hawk brain in my head. The hunger I felt was the hunger of the hawk.
    I flopped and hopped up into my drawer. But it was soft. And what my hawk body wanted was not the warmth and comfort of the blanket.
    Hawks make nests of sticks. Hawks spend their nights on a friendly branch, feeling the breeze, hearing the nervous chittering of prey, watching the owls hunt.
    I hopped up out of the drawer. I couldn’t stay there. I was so tired I was past being able to rest. I was restless.
    I flew back out into the night. Hawks are not usually nocturnal. The night belongs to other hunters. But I wasn’t ready to rest.
    I flew aimlessly for a while, but I knew in my heart where I was going.
    Rachel’s bedroom light was still on. I fluttered down and landed on a birdhouse she had deliberately nailed out there for me to land on when I came over.
    I rustled my wing softly against the glass. I scratched with one talon.
    A moment later the window slid up. She was there, wearing a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers.
    “Hi,” she said. “I was worried about you!”
     I asked. But I knew the answer.
    “We weren’t very sensitive this afternoon,” she said. She spoke in a whisper. We couldn’t let her mother or one of her little sisters overhear her having a one-sided conversation with no one.
     I said.
    “Come inside. I have my bedroom door locked.” I hopped in through the window and fluttered over to her dresser.
    Suddenly I realized something was behind me. I turned my head around. It was a mirror. I was looking at myself.
    I had a reddish tail of long, straight feathers. The rest of my back was mottled dark brown. I had big shoulders that looked kind of hunched, like I was a football lineman ready for the snap. My head was streamlined. My brown eyes were fierce as I stared over the deadly weapon of my beak.
    I turned my head forward, looking away from my reflection.
    “What do you mean, Tobias?” I wish I could have smiled. She looked so worried. I wish I could have smiled, just a little, to make her feel better.
    
    “Wh — What … How do you mean?” she asked.She bit her lip and tried not to let me see. But of course, hawk eyes miss nothing.
    
    “You belong with us,” Rachel said firmly. “You are a human being, Tobias.”
     I asked her.
    “Because what counts is what is in your head and in your heart,” she said with sudden passion. “A person isn’t his body. A person isn’t what’s on the outside.”
    
    I could see that she wanted to cry. But Rachel is a person with strength that runs all the way through her. Maybe that’s why I came to see her. I needed someone to be sure. I wanted someone to let me borrow a little of their strength.
    She went over to her nightstand and opened the drawer.