Predator jackal

High on the hill above the smoking battleground a jackal peered out of a shallow cave, cautious and alert. Or at least it was a jackal a minute ago. Now, if you came up close and looked in its yellow eyes, you would have observed the faintest network of scales, as if the eye was composed of thousands of minute chambers intricate as a beehive.

For the alien had advanced again. Now for the first time it occupied the body of a hot-blooded mammal. From a single patch of jackal hair snagged by a branch at the mouth of the cave the alien had replicated with a massive surge of power, and now its matted coat twitched away the jungle flies as it watched the carnage below. It liked the feel of blood in its veins. It even felt a kind of kinship to the mad warrior running riot in the camp.

Its eyes slowly adjusted to the explosive blasts that had earlier seemed to blind it. An eerie, surreal kaleidoscope unfolded as its heat vision scanned the camp. Screams of mutilation and pain echoed through the jungle as laserlike rockets zapped in all directions, reducing men and equipment to ruin.

   The Predator (1987 novelization), chapter 5