Predator cottonwood branch

About twenty yards north of the clearing a red and ochre spotted butterfly flew in among the prickly vines that hung like high-tension wires from the gray-barked cottonwood trees. Randomly, as if it needed to pause to get its bearings, the vivid creature landed on a cottonwood branch, still flexing its wings lightly even at rest, its feet hardly touching the gnarled bark. A moment later the insect flew off, leaving a curious imprint on the bark like a shadow of itself, almost like an X-ray.

  Up close in fact, the bark didn’t look like wood matter at all. It seemed made up of microscopic scales, as if this one tree were fashioned out of some kind of synthetic. Then the printed shadow of the butterfly seemed to bleed into the bark itself, and finally the image disappeared, swallowed into the tree. The branch was moving slightly now, but not as if rustled by any breeze. It almost appeared to be breathing. Then it quivered and began to withdraw toward the trunk of the tree, silent as a boa constrictor.

  Now what had seemed to be just smother cottonwood tree began to ripple with color, iridescent as a chameleon. Some weird flow of force was making its way through the molecules of the tree, groping toward the roots. For all anyone knew, this sort of transformation happened all the time in the Usamacinta jungle. Perhaps it was only more of the same force that grew the six-inch orchids and the grasshoppers big as mice.

  For all anyone knew, that is. But no one knew. No one had even the first glimmering of an idea.

  For the tree creature breathed the jungle differently from those who had evolved there. In reality it was no more a cottonwood branch than it was anything else on earth. It somehow discerned living tissue from inanimate objects by picking up the heat patterns of living cells. It saw the outlines of all living creatures shaded with a sort of liquid color that was the pulse of the heat of life. But “saw” is very imprecise, for it only had eyes when it felt like having eyes. It was like a lost soul searching for a form in which to flower. And now suddenly it had focused its yearnings on the most developed creature in the world it had come to visit—man.

  As the team struggled through the brush, the creature followed them like an obsession beneath the jungle floor, rippling from root to root. It drove forward like a mad scientist consumed by his own curiosity. It still required a thousand clues to what made a man tick. Since it needed no earthly form of its own beyond what it chose to assume, it was incapable of feeling emotion toward any of the earthling tribes. It knew no pity and no remorse. It was the war and the warrior all in one.

   The Predator (1987 novelization), chapter 3