Predator hawk

For when Anna overcame Ramirez only minutes before, the alien had been crouching in the upper branches of a mahogany tree towering above the rock pool. It had sensed, and in its way relished, every detail of the skirmish between the two. Curious and obsessed, it watched Ramirez clutch his groin, instinctively understanding who was the loser, who the winner. It watched the rebel woman clamber away up the ridge with a sense of triumph spilling over from its own soul. It suddenly longed for a victory of its own, so it could fly with the winner and kill the winner and have it all.

Exultantly transforming itself from observer mode to predator mode, it quickly searched the surrounding sky till it settled on a hawk sailing gracefully by, its wings held perfectly still while the heat-soaked air currents wafted it like a billowing schooner. The unearthly intruder followed the bird’s flight with its neat vision. Then, with its sixth-sense power of capture, it zeroed in on the hawk’s essence, its mind steering the bird toward it like some remote-controlled toy. The hawk’s soul was lost to the alien, possessed like a zombie.

For this was the effortless power the alien found it had over every creature it encountered on the host planet—every one, that is, but man. It could kill a man but not take him over—could dissect him down to the cell structure, but not inhabit him body and soul. Perhaps it was the elusive matter of the soul that made man impenetrable to the alien—man the justice-giver, man the idea-maker. Something in any case that the alien lacked, and all the more reason to destroy the species utterly if there was no other way of possessing it.

Wings frozen, the hawk dropped helplessly from the air, and the alien snatched it out of the sky with an outstretched hand. It pulled the bird close and held it gently in both three-fingered hands, fanning the white neck feathers where the quivering bird lay paralyzed. Then the alien bent its head down and almost seemed to nuzzle the bird, purring as if to calm it—till the stunning transformation occurred. First the alien’s skin swirled with all the mottled autumn shades, hues blending and churning like a kaleidoscope till it settled on the exact slate gray of the bird’s feathers. Then its lizardlike skin swirled down and its form melted and compressed and took the hawk’s shape. When it was an exact clone of the animal it dropped the limp hawk from its talons, letting it fall to be consumed by predators of its own.

An instant later the reincarnated hawk flapped its wings as if it had just awakened to a new day. Its razor talons released their viselike grip on the topmost branch. Soaring into the air it set off up the ridge after Anna and Hawkins. Unlike the true hawk, which drifted in wide dreamlike circles, the alien slapped the air with a surge of power as it sped over the trees, drinking in the species at the peak of force, in a wild drunken thirst for prey. With the easy edge of a bird in a race with the earthbound it sailed above its prey, catching the girl’s pace but then outdistancing her by a hundred yards and lazily combing back in a hawk’s pure circle.

   The Predator (1987 novelization), chapter 9