- Narrator: Cassie
The Yeerks partially repair the Helmacron ship's ability to sense morphing energy. While Cassie is trying to hide the morphing cube, a buffalo touches it, accidentally gaining the power to morph.
Tropes:
- Anvil on Head: Discussed when the Animorphs brainstorm ways to destroy the helicopter that has the Helmacron ship inside. Marco suggests dropping an anvil on the chopper, which the Animorphs realize is viable if the anvil in question is Cassie in humpback whale morph. Unfortunately, this plan fails.
- Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: The question of what to do with the buffalo is solved when the human-Controllers in the helicopter vaporize it with a Dracon beam.
- Big Damn Heroes: The buffalo saves the Animorphs when they're outnumbered by Taxxon and Hork-Bajir Controllers, which turns the tide of the battle in their favor.
- Butter Face: Ant-Cassie almost completely morphs into Cassie, leaving only its ant face on Cassie's body.
- Breaking the Bonds: The buffalo is restrained when Cassie first encounters it. Seeing a human getting too close to it causes the buffalo to strain so hard the ropes snap, freeing it.
- Brutish Bulls: The buffalo is as territorial as one can expect a wild African Cape buffalo to be. Cassie is forced to acquire it when she sneaks into its enclosure to make sure it doesn't hurt her. Cassie's narration from when she morphs into it tells what the buffalo thinks of himself.Normally I was a calm, peaceful, grazing animal.
Until I was threatened. Provoked.
And then, nothing could stop me. - Deus ex Machina: The threat of Yeerks with morph-tracking technology is ended by the highly improbable event of a normal seagull getting sucked into the rotor of their helicopter and causing it to explode.
- Didn't Think This Through: Visser Three manages to corner Cassie and the morphing cube in a truck that he gets told is transporting a Cape buffalo. He ignores the handler telling him to stop and opens the door. He just so happened to be in human morph at the time. Predictably, he gets crushed by Cassie in buffalo morph, and the actual buffalo follows up.
- Dropped a Bridge on Him: The buffalo was obviously not going to survive the book, but it gets killed with little warning, right after having saved Cassie from ant-Cassie.
- Humans Are Cthulhu: The buffalo's instincts describe man as "The most infuriating scent, the most unnatural threat" after dismissing lions as the only real challengers to itself.
- Humanity Ensues:
- The buffalo acquires Chapman after running him down, then copies Cassie as she demorphs.
- An ant crawls on the morphing cube and acquires Cassie shortly afterward, causing a scuffle when it panickily attacks Cassie while mostly morphed into her.
- Mirror Match: The buffalo acquires Alloran when Visser Three jabs one of its wounds, then morphs to Andalite and fights him tail-to-tail.
- Mutants: How the buffalo and ant-Cassie are treated by the Animorphs. Ax even calls the buffalo a mutant when talking about it. Non-sapient morphers tend to not morph completely, and thus usually end up wobbling around as mish-mashed monstrosities.
- My Instincts Are Showing: When Cassie morphs into the buffalo, she quickly loses herself thanks to the panic she feels from being surrounded by Controllers. As a result, she flattens Visser Three's human morph and half a dozen human-Controllers when the truck's door is opened. She only regains control when Tobias reminds her that the morphing cube is still in the truck.
- Squashed Flat: After ant-Cassie demorphs, Cassie frantically stomps on it until she's sure it's dead.
- Turbine Blender: When "drop Cassie in whale morph on the helicopter" fails, a normal seagull gets sucked into the copter's rotor blades, which causes it to explode.
- Use Your Head: This is how buffalos fight, and it's perfectly serviceable against human, Hork-Bajir, and Taxxon-Controllers. It's not as serviceable when the buffalo tries using it in human morph.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The Animorphs discuss this while they search for the buffalo. Rachel wants to get rid of the buffalo as fast as possible, which means killing it. Cassie is uncomfortable with the idea of killing it, as it's been human. The others note that if it hadn't been given the power to morph into a human, they'd have left it to die with no problem, as they've done with other animals who've been mistaken for them in the past.
