"In the old days you had to protect your babies from those big birds. Now these birds all understand firearms and they keep their distance. Birds understand more than we give them credit for. Much more. They know things about us which we ourselves barely know. Not your name and date of birth, but other things. Perhaps you’re carrying an illness which no doctor has yet told you about. They see it in the way you walk, or stand. I’ve never seen a hawk take its prey. But I think of deep dark water when I think of those hawks attacking. I think of something coming up from below and snatching what was happy on the surface in the Sun. Something swift which comes from nowhere, like lightning from below. Bolts of lightning sprung from the Earth. And not, as you might think, from the Sky."

georgia and the minotaur        Georgia wasn’t afraid of the Minotaur. We saw the Minotaur on tv. It was an old movie, one of those Ray Harryhausen movies which have some of the greatest monsters you ever saw. Little Pete was afraid of the Minotaur, and Nick was afraid too but he was old enough so that he could hide it. He smiled and pretended he wasn’t afraid, but if you sneaked a look over at him when he didn’t know it, you’d see his eyes going wide. The Minotaur was a monster who was born of two fathers, one mortal and the other immortal, and a single mother. In the old days this sort of thing was still possible, but nowadays it can’t happen anymore. Ten or twenty thousand years ago the Pole Star shifted in relation to the Earth, and as a consequence the psychic channels in humans which control that sort of thing shifted as well, and the processes of procreation were re-routed. Anyway, Georgia was watching the movie with us, and when the Minotaur came on screen, and it was time for Theseus to fight the Minotaur, Georgia didn’t even blink an eye. As scared as I was of the  Minotaur, I still couldn’t help watching Georgia to get her reaction. She couldn’t have cared less about the so-called monster. I said to her, “Georgia, what do you think of the Minotaur?,” and without even moving her head she just shifted her eyes in my direction, gave me one unconcerned look and then returned to gazing in the general direction of the tv screen.

       
Both my boys were amazed by the monster. They couldn’t believe that Theseus had the courage to face that terrible thing. Theseus only had one short straight sword. He didn’t even have a shield. The Minotaur had fierce horns. He had the head of a bull on a human body, but his body looked like it had the strength of a bull. Theseus was nowhere near as strong-looking as the Minotaur. How could he possibly win this fight? What made him so brave, when it looked like he didn’t have a chance to win? My wife was passing by the tv and she stopped to look affectionately at the monster. Ray Harryhausen used a special effects technique he had himself created called “claymation.” He built the models of his monsters and then he moved every smallest part and photographed them and he had a way of making his monsters move in a fashion which was truly scary. Since my wife is a clay artist and makes vases and things, she appreciated what Harryhausen was doing. My daughters weren’t really interested in monsters or in the battle between the Minotaur and the hero Theseus. Maddy had watched the movie with us for a while and then without saying anything had gotten up and gone back to her room. Anna glanced at the tv on her way out the door and smiled and kept right on going. It was really just me and Georgia and the two boys who were fascinated by the battle. I forgot to tell you that Georgia was our dog. We’d gotten her from the pound after our first dog Berry died of old age. When they brought Georgia into the pound, the famous Ray Charles song was playing on the radio, so the lady in charge of the pound named the dog Georgia, and we kept the name. Georgia was a sweet female black dog, a lab and pit bull mix around fifty pounds, and she fit right in with the family like she’d been with us forever. My wife and Maddy found her at the pound, and the next day, a Saturday, I drove down there with Little Pete and gave Georgia the "Little Pete test.” I just tossed Pete into the fenced in yard where Georgia was roaming and watched the two of them play. She chased Pete around the tree and they ran back and forth for ten minutes. I said to the lady, “Okay, we’ll take her.” The lady said, “We need to keep her for a week till she gets all her shots etc.,” so Pete and I had to say goodbye to her while the lady put her on the leash and brought her back inside. The look Georgia gave us when she was led away from us was truly heartbreaking.

       
Georgia stopped for a moment and looked back at us and the lady who ran the pound, who was kindhearted, waited a moment while Pete waved to Georgia one more time. The next day I brought Nick down to see her, and he hugged her and ruffled her fur and looked at me with a big smile, and I could see the two of them were already friends. We brought her home the next week, and I came in through the front door and Nick and Pete and Maddy were all scratching her belly as she stretched out on the floor, and my friend Raphael said, “Do you think she’s getting enough love?” Later on they were all playing and rough-housing and at a certain point I thought it was getting a little too rough so I walked over and said “Hey!” and Georgia just stopped and sat down and looked at me with complete respect. She knew immediately and completely how our pack was organized. I never had to tell her anything more than once. There wasn’t a mean bone in her body, and yet she was fierce in their defense and completely loyal towards our children. So even though she herself wasn’t afraid of the Minotaur, still she realized that for some strange reason Pete and Nick were afraid of the Minotaur, and so she kept the Minotaur vaguely on her radar while she dozed in and out on the floor in front of the tv, with Nick sitting cross legged on one side of her, and Pete stretched out on the other side of her with his head on her back, his eyes turned towards the monster. Daedalus was the name of the mighty and intelligent man-demon who had built the spiraling Labyrinth which kept the Minotaur imprisoned. No ordinary prison could have contained the monster. But Daedalus had studied the spirals in nautilus sea shells and had discovered the Fibonacci sequence, and the Minotaur wandered round and round through the maze, thinking he was making his way towards the exit, but really he was always just staying in the same place. Daedalus had wings. He was smaller than a dwarf and very old but he looked very strong and no one had eyes that were brighter or more intelligent. He gave the Princess Ariadne the mathematical formula to the Labyrinth because he loved her, but she loved Theseus and so she gave the formula to Theseus and that’s how Theseus found the monster in the maze. What Ray Harryhausen didn’t understand was that, when the Minotaur monster fought Theseus, the Minotaur looked at Theseus and he saw many versions of Theseus all at the same time, and that’s how Theseus was able to defeat him. Because Theseus understood the nature of infinite spirals, thanks to the formula Princess Ariadne had given him. But all the Minotaur ever saw when he looked in a mirror was his own reflection. How could he ever understand spirals? He never knew how much he was missing, until it was too late.

       
But that part wasn’t in the movie because I just made it up. Afterwards the King punished Daedalus for giving the formula to the Princess Ariadne. He imprisoned Icarus, who was the only son of Daedalus. He locked Icarus in a high tower. Icarus wasn't born with wings. Daedalus himself had his own natural set of wings. So he decided to create artificial wings for his son Icarus, and then the two of them flew away across the sea. But the artificial wings didn’t last long. Icarus was having so much fun flying that he put too much stress on the wings with all his dips and dives, and the wings started to unravel. The last time Daedalus saw Icarus, Icarus was falling into the clouds below. Everybody thought that Icarus drowned in the ocean. But he didn’t. One great gust of wind, which was really the Wind God, caught Icarus and tossed him across the water and into a forest where he crashed down into the trees. He survived his fall, though he was badly wounded, and then the forest creatures took care of him and nursed him back to health. Afterwards, he always had a limp. Daedalus searched and searched for the body of his son in the water below, but he had no luck. Daedalus was a ruined man-demon. He never invented anything ever again. He even stopped flying. His wings shriveled on his back. Finally he returned to the Labyrinth. The Minotaur was now just a skeleton, dead and lost somewhere in all those infinite ever-recurring spirals. Daedalus went to live inside the Labyrinth. The place was like an old museum which nobody visits anymore, or like an old football stadium where no more games are played, but they haven’t torn the place down yet. My kids didn’t know about this part of the story when they watched the big fight on tv. They cheered when Theseus killed the Minotaur. But I watched Georgia as she patiently played her part as the protector of Nick and Pete, who were both glad she was there beside them. When she glanced at me that time without moving her head, and I spoke to her as Theseus approached the monster for the final battle and asked her what her feelings on the subject of the monster were, I felt that she understood the whole story of the Minotaur as well as I did. Maybe even better than I did. She had no use for brilliant little men with wings, and the monsters they imprison or create.