The Care and Feeding of Griffins Read Free Page A

shifted and rocked once or twice, as all the tiny dragons drifted down to nest, and busied herself once more with the paper in her lap.
    Taryn could feel her mom’s hand, gently insistent, guiding her back to the car.  She walked backward a step or two, willing her mom to see the dragons, but finally gave in to the inevitability of defeat.  She knew better, even at six and sixteen days, then to say anything herself.  Mom and Dad were better about it than most, but no grown-up liked it when a little kid drew their attention to something they hadn’t noticed.
    Apart from that, Taryn was aware (if only peripherally) that asking if you could see tiny dragons was a question that demanded tact, and Taryn knew (again, peripherally) that she lacked the vocabulary for tact.  If she asked anything, it would end up coming out of her as, “What’s the matter with you?  Are you congenitally incapable of seeing dragons or what?” and then this whole great day would be ruined.
    So she let it go.
    She accepted the dragons, accepted that her mom wasn’t interested in them, accepted that perhaps Mom couldn’t even see the dragons and that the reasons for this were unknowable and possibly distressing, and so she just let the matter drop and went home.  But she saw them, whether her mom could or not, Taryn saw the dragons.  Long after she grew up, sometimes she would see a dark-haired vaguely-gypsy-looking woman and think, ‘There really were dragons,’ and then smile, not really believing (and yet believing unreservedly) that she had seen them.
    In any event, Taryn had her Redmond L ibrary card for only six years before she moved with her family to Oregon, and by then she had mostly forgotten about the dragons and already had the egg.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    3.  The Finding of the Egg
     
    T aryn’s dad took her camping every year.  He always had, and even after the baby came, he kept doing it.  Not that Taryn had been worried about that, exactly, but there had been a lot of changes since Rhiannon got born.  And sure, Taryn liked being a big sister most of the time, but some things shouldn’t change and it was nice when they didn’t.
    Most of the time, they camped up in the Dunes at Dead Horse Flats, but Dad said it got bought up and now they couldn ’t camp there anymore because it was trespassing.  Taryn thought this was hugely unfair.  If it wasn’t trespassing to fish and play with beetles in the sand when she was four, it shouldn’t be now that she was nine.  She resolved then and there to become a millionaire girl-genius and buy up Dead Horse Flats again and make it so everyone could camp there if they wanted.
    Not that it mattered a whole lot.  Dad had other camping spots and they were just as cool as the Dunes.  The day that Taryn found the egg, he had taken her to a campsite up in the mountains, in the for-real woods.  It was a long drive, up where the roads and the radio didn ’t go, and you couldn’t drink your pop because the car was bouncing all over the place, but Dad told great camping stories the whole time about the last time he’d camped up here and how the coyotes danced in the moonlight and how much fun this was going to be. 
    But once the y had the camp set up, Taryn’s dad went into the tent to sleep—which was a perfectly good waste of the afternoon in Taryn’s opinion—and she was free to explore.  She got her whistle and her camping knife (one of Dad’s, and she only got to carry it when she was camping, but Dad said when she was twelve, he’d give her one she could keep) and a compass and her walking stick and she set off.
    Taryn was a good camper.  She knew to keep the car in sight when she was hiking alone and to check her compass often to stay on track.  She knew to sing as she walked to keep bears from getting startled by her, and to keep her eyes out for bobcats and killer snipes.  She ’d never seen either for real, but her dad had