A farrier reads a hoof before he reads the animal it came off. Kerr Bligh has shod plow teams at Dole Wood for twenty-two years, and the parings he finds in the lane behind the pear orchard are not goat. A goat wears its hooves down on rock and leaves them ragged. These crescents are pared level with a knife, the sole scooped out the way a farrier scoops it, and the heel cut a little deep. Somebody has been looking after those feet. Kerr drops the paring in his apron pocket with the nails and says only that the satyr is back, and that he sounds pleased.
The oldest account is a slate from Jibb Common, scratched by a hedge-layer who reports that for six days a figure sat on the far bank of his laid hedge, piping, and that every pleacher in the gang worked to the tune and laid the best hedge of his life. Two centuries later a cider-maker's daybook from the same parish records an empty cask found upright in a ditch, bung out, smelling of pear, and the best cider in memory the following year. By the time the tithe survey of Dole Wood was drawn, the surveyor had marked a gatepost on the map with a small cross and the word rubbed. The post is still there.
It is rubbed because it is a back-scratcher. Each dusk the satyr leans against it, shoulder blades to the wood, and works from side to side for the better part of an hour, shifting from one hoof to the other and humming flat. The bark is gone to the height of a tall man's shoulders and the wood beneath has the polish of an old banister.
The satyr himself stands about as tall as a man, barrel-chested, with coarse chestnut hair running from the hip to the hoof. One horn spirals to a point. The other is snapped off at the length of a thumb and worn gray and blunt. His face is sharp-boned and easy, with a crooked nose, a strong jaw and amber eyes, and a pear leaf is usually caught in his black curls. He wears a sleeveless vest of patched sheepskin and carries a set of reed pipes banded with saffron wax. He eats windfall pears and cider dregs, and what he leaves on the wall tops is cores, in rows. His prints come in pairs, deep at the heel, because he walks upright and leans back when he listens. Households at Jibb Common set a bench by the hedge at dusk, and anyone who starts dancing when the pipes sound across the fence is allowed to finish. A basket of bruised windfalls on the wall is the custom, and it usually comes back with a tune.
- Classification
- Fae, goat-legged woodland folk
- Habitat
- Orchard edges and old hedgerows
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 5.5 ft, about human height
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Hedgerow and orchard borderlands
- Binomial
- Capripes pomarius
- Diet
- Windfall pears, cider dregs, hedge herbs
- Temperament
- Idle, musical, good-humored