The Care and Feeding of Griffins Read Online Free PDF Page A

whatever. 
    N o one could seem to agree on a description any better than a name.  Griffins supposedly had ‘the ears of an ass’.  Her baby had a couple of dimples on the sides of its head, hidden in the secret way of birds beneath a crop of down.  Some websites stated with authority that all griffins were female.  Well, her baby was definitely a boy, which still other websites asserted were wingless beasts called keythongs, contemptuously adding that it was an anomalous and very recent addition to the myth.  Other sites told her that the griffin’s tail was that of a snake or a scorpion.  Her baby’s tail was just as lion-like as the rest of his fanny.  The griffin was said to build nests high in trees or mountains, not in dens like where she’d found it, and instead of eggs, like the one sitting broken in her closet, it laid agates.  Just as many websites warned her that the baby was bound to grow into a mindless and murderous animal whose only talent lay in finding gold as there were extolling the wisdoms of a scholarly griffin.
    Nowhere on any of the countless websites that Taryn visited was there any information on what griffins ate, unless you counted the many assurances that griffins would leap on and messily devour anyone who disturbed their golden hoards.  Oh, and one page that went into disturbingly graphic detail when it came to the story of a griffin who habitually carried virgins screaming off to its lair, where it monstrously deflowered them before dining.  As a virgin, Taryn supposed she’d ought to be concerned, but she was a lot more worried about the fact that whoever authored that particular page was out driving tonight than she was in mortal peril of her own life.
    And now here it was, half the night gone and she still had no idea what to do.  Her griffin, or gryphon or whatever, was just as real and alive as it had been when it hatched out of her closet, but it wasn ’t going to stay that way unless she started figuring out some basic principles in a real hurry.
    As if sensing her distress, the baby hugging her shirtfront bobbed its head around in blind agitation.  It brushed against a button at her collar and instantly lunged out to bite it.
    “ No no,” Taryn murmured, stroking its powder-puff head, and it settled back down against her breast and peeped at her.
    It was hungry.  It needed to eat.  Forget all the disinformation swimming around in cyberspace and focus in on that one thing.  What did griffins eat?   Besides virgins.  She qualified, but she failed to see how loping off limbs to feed to the little tyke would help it in the long run.
    She hated to guess.  She hated it and she had to do it, and it left her feeling sick all the way to the soles of her feet.  She was sitting in her living room with what could be the only griff-something in the whole world and that didn ’t leave a lot of wiggle-room for making mistakes.  She had never been so terrified in her entire life.  She could feel the baby’s life like a stone in her stomach.  She’d found it, she’d hatched it, and unless she did everything right the first time, she was going to watch it die from her ignorance.
    A griffin.  A real, liv e griffin.
    The enormity of it tried to close in on her as it had done a dozen times since the hatching, but this time she managed to fight it off.  She couldn ’t keep freaking out.  He was depending on her.  He needed her to be focused.  He had no one else.
    Never once did it occur to Taryn to share her discovery with anyone else.  The egg itself had been to o unusual, too fantastic to show to anyone; over the years, she’d had many opportunities to turn the egg over to scientists and so forth, but she never had.  Deep down, there was a part of her that had never expected a natural bird to hatch.  Deeper down, she had always known something really would.  And now it was here, the most miraculous and precious thing Taryn’s mind could even conceive.  There