Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!  Or a happy Thursday, for the majority of the world.

The kids start taking off through the woods, I guess in a random direction since earlier Marco pointed out that “mountains” is a big area and yet none of them made any attempt to narrow it down a bit.  The book is more concerned with how funny it is that Jake keeps stopping to mark his territory.

And also they stop to howl.

Jake admitted sheepishly.

Okay, I’m not exactly an expert on animal behavior, but…I’m pretty sure instincts aren’t like someone playing Sims.  They don’t just reach out and bop you on the head and say “do this now.”  Wolves do things in reaction to their environment.  Even the thing with the scent-marking.  We’ve seen Jake and Rachel now be in animals that interact via scent, and they’ve always known what and why they were doing things.  Rachel recognized the scent of a dominant cat and knew what it meant.  So why can’t Jake get the urge to mark his territory instead of the urge to pee?  Why can’t they hear other wolves in the area and feel the need to howl a warning, instead of just the urge to howl out of the blue?

Also, apparently Tobias has been flying through the trees this whole time instead of above them, because that’s not a pure waste of energy or anything. 

I tried to imagine what it must be like to be a wolf. The amazing sense of smell. The incredible hearing. All that confident power, those ripping teeth, the cool intelligence.

Maybe later I would ask Jake or Rachel about it.

Then you could ask them what it was like to be human. Maybe they can tell me about that, too, I thought bitterly.

*wibbles*  I forgive your bad logic, book.  Come here, let me hug you.

Out of pure luck, it seems they were headed in the right direction, because Tobias sees a bunch of Park Service trucks around a lake, then he ‘feels’ the invisible ship again. 

So..this is the third time the ship has shown up.  First, at sunset and moving away from the lake.  Then, early morning and moving towards it.  Implying that it stays there all day and then goes home at night.  Only now it’s mid-afternoon and the ship is just now arriving.  Then, for some reason, helicopters get added to the mix, because apparently these highly advanced aliens can’t just scan the area from the sky with their superior technology.  Anyway, there’s Hork-Bajir in the choppers.  It’s presented to us as some big reveal, but…um, was anyone really in doubt about the invisible flying ship belonging to aliens?

Tobias meets up with the wrong wolf pack, then skedaddles and finds the right group of talking wolves to tell them what happened.

For the record, how do they have so many Park Rangers, but only one cop that we know of?

Jake said.

And therefore…

Come on, Jake, this isn’t hard…

You’re more than a mile away from the enemy and in complete isolation…

Guys, demorph and reset the clock!  You should be doing that automatically, come on!

The invisible ship finally arrives and turns de-invisible.  It’s described as the size of an aircraft carrier.  Over a thousand feet long.  Ten football fields, then a few more for good measure.  Huge.  Able to house a small city.

In other words, clearly visible to anyone with eyes, even if they are in the god damn mountains. If you can see a carrier out on the horizon while standing on shore, then you can see this ship out in the mountains while standing in town.  I guess they could be a valley or behind a hill or just something that would block the view of this thing, but in that case, it would be nice to know.  It would have to be a really big hill.  Especially since it’s not only a huge, tall ship, but it’s also hovering quite a long distance above the lake.

They realize that the ship is sucking in air and water.  Huh, I wonder if the point here is that Yeerks aren’t really all that advanced.  Although that would be a very strange combination, if you could have spaceships but not understand how to recycle water or keep an oxygen farm.

Marco mused.

I mean, yeah, they comment on it…but we can do these things.  Right now.  Humans, with modern day technology.  We understand that you can recycle water and that plants turn CO2 into breathable air.  So the Yeerks aren’t just below Star Trek level, they’re below our level.

The others leave because they can’t figure out how to reset their time limit and therefore they’re almost at two hours.  Tobias stays and goes to chase sweet, sweet hawk tail with Polly.  And then he gets scared because he’s feeling a bit too hawk-ish, but all I can think is WTF is up with Polly?  Really, instincts are nice and all that, but you still can’t just toss a pet out into the wild and expect it to do fine.

Mid-freak out over the impending loss of his humanity, he runs back to see his friends, only to discover that they’re facing off with that other wolf pack from earlier.

I will say this for the book: at least things aren’t just left hanging.  Polly and the extra wolves make a comeback.  It’s still filler, of course, but at least it’s not one-shot filler.

Anyway, Jake can’t back off because then the other pack might attack instead of let them leave quietly.  Tobias decides to defuse the situation by just stealing the rabbit that they were fighting over.

I yelled.

But…last book you carried Rachel/Fluffer pretty far…

Tobias goes to find the time, then realizes that they’re past the two-hour mark, so he runs back to tell them to demorph.  Because they didn’t have the sense to reset the clock before arriving at the big group of bad guys.  There’s a few pages where it looks like they’re going to get stuck between morphs, but Cassie talks them all into calming down and completing the process. 

“That was close,” Rachel said. “That was way too close. It was so hard. It was like trying to climb up out of a pool of molasses.”

Hm, I wonder if it’s not just a hard limit at two hours, and instead it just gets harder to change the longer you go, and around-about two hours is where it gets impossibly difficult for most people.  So there could be some variance, with some people able to go, like, two and a half hours and others only lasting one-forty-five. 

But that sounds interesting.  Let’s forget it and never have this kind of a scare again, instead treating the two hour limit like an on/off switch.

They’re all happy and celebrating that they didn’t get trapped, which of course makes Tobias feel like shit since he did get trapped.  For all the lead-up to this scene was contrived, the emotional payout is gold.  I love the disparity between the kids celebrating and Tobias juggling guilt and resentment. 

I looked at my wing. It would never be an arm. It would never again end in a hand. I would never touch. I would never touch anything … anyone … again.

And, of course, the occasional lines that just make you start bawling.

my own silent, voiceless scream echoing in my head.

…followed immediately by lines that sound like they belong in teenaged angsty poetry.

Everything’s a bit hit and miss in these books.

Much later that night, Tobias flies back to Jake’s attic.  Then he decides everything there is wrong, so he goes to see Rachel instead.  Tobias spills his fears about losing his humanity to the hawk, and Rachel tries to reassure him.  She even gives him a picture of himself when he was human, but no one brings up t he question of why the fuck she had a picture of him.  She didn’t know him before the events at the construction site.  Did she sneak of pic of him somewhere in between all that running around and spying?  Did she know him before that, and…stalked him?

The next day, the kids all meet at Jake’s house, but for some reason Tobias spends a full page narrating about how he watched them all go home and then come out again.  Nothing really happened.  They got out of school, they went home, and a few hours later they all went to Jake’s house.  …Riveting. 

They sit around and talk about what to do, and Marco comes up with the idea of sneaking on the ship and turning it visible while it’s over the town.  (Apparently not realizing that the Yeerks are completely incompetent and will eventually just do that by accident for them.  Really, they’ve come pretty close to that a half a dozen times already.)

I said.

You know what would also do this?

A plane.

Just get a regular human plane, full of people, and fly it over the mountains at the right time.  In a later book, we find out their town has an airport.  This was written pre-9/11.  Hijack a plane, fly it over the right spot, tell people to look out the window and take pictures.  I mean, still illegal and all that, but there’s less chance of getting alien-lasered to death in the process.

In fact…their town has an airport.  Are the Yeerks keeping track of flight patterns so that no incoming jets are nearby to see this?  Remember, this ship is the size of an aircraft carrier.  You don’t exactly have to be right on top of it to spot it.

“And then we could go to the authorities. The Controllers wouldn’t be able to stop us! We could tell all we know!”

Um….what? 

The reason they don’t go to the authorities now is that they don’t know which reporter is a Controller and which isn’t.  They aren’t lacking in proof; they have a talking hawk and can turn into animals.  So if they reveal the supply ship, what changes?  They still won’t know which reporters are Controllers and which aren’t. The Controllers won’t just spontaneously pack up and go home once the news breaks; they’ll be pretending to be shocked right along with everyone else.

But that’s their plan now.  Sneak up the pipes as fish, ???, decloak the ship, ???, profit.