1. Introducing Yekttis Amanda and Ari, eight-year-old twins, discovered some strange creatures near their home in Wyoming. These creatures were living in abandoned prairie dog burrows next to a dirt road that the twins used as a shortcut to school. Amanda and Ari started studying these creatures. They visited them every chance they had. Because these creatures never came all the way out of their holes in the ground, Amanda and Ari could only see their heads. The creatures looked as though they might have come from another planet.

2. Ari loved to make up codes and learn about languages. After a few months, he learned how to say some words in the creatures� own language, and he taught them a few words in English and in Spanish. He learned that the creatures called themselves Yekttis (YEK-tees), that they came from a very distant planet, and that they were peaceful.

3. Amanda liked to study different kinds of living things. She decided to do a report about the Yektis for a science project at school. She made a sketch of the head of each of the Yektis she had seen. She noticed that many of them were similar to one another, but that no two were exactly alike. She used her sketches to figure out how she could describe to other human beings what the Yektis looked like.