The Last Satyr: The Company is Formed Part 1

“Boy!”

The boy had been about to pick up his flute to play when his ears perked up at the call. He may not have had an elf’s keen ears, but he recognized her tone. Athiel had chores for him to do. The boy wasn’t supposed to do chores as a satyr. Yet his half-brother, Sith, deemed it unfair that he had to do all the work while the boy reveled in his idleness. Strangely, the boy agreed. He loved work. He could sit and watch others do it for hours. He didn’t answer.

“Boy!”

Athiel was downstairs at the bottom of their treehouse. The boy supposed he could have jumped out his upstairs window as satyrs aren’t afraid to jump from high places, but she’d hear his hooves hit the ground when he landed for sure. He was going to have to use the stairs to get by her.

“Now where’s that goat boy gone? Where are you, boy?”

He took to the staircase and carefully navigated the steps down. Now elves may be terribly keen of hearing, but the boy was equally keen on being a thief, and one thing a good thief has to learn is to be terribly, terribly quiet, particularly when he has hooves that go clop-clop and there are elf ears about. He made it down the stairs without her hearing a thing, a phantom in the shadows. There, he peeked cautiously around the staircase, and spied her.

The elderly elf woman was studying the main room of the hollowed-out tree. Like all elves, she had the eyes of an eagle, but they did her no good now, for she had her back to him. She saw plenty of signs of where he’d once been, but not where he was now. Still, it was no small challenge for the boy to get by her. She looked perplexed for now though and then said, loud enough for even the tree itself to hear:

“If you’re hiding on me, I’ll—”

She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and checking under the couch for him with a broom. She resurrected nothing but an angry raccoon.

Next, she stepped to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and “jimson” weeds that constituted the garden. No sign of the boy there either. So she lifted her voice at an angle intended for distance and shouted:

“You, goat boy!”

Seizing the opportune moment during her vocal proclamation, the boy initiated his move, banking on her voice to cloak the sound of his hooves on the moss-covered floor. He miscalculated. With a knowing smile, she turned around just in time to intercept him by his pointed ear and arrest his flight.

“Think you can hide from an elf?” she queried with a raised brow. “By now, you ought to know better. And look at you! What have you been up to? Stealing again?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Not stealing? Look at your hands. What’s that red? It looks like strawberries to me! Do we have strawberries in this house?”

The boy squirmed under scrutiny.

“We do now,” he warily replied.

“And you didn’t pick them, did you?”

“Well… I sort of picked them.”

“What you mean is you picked them from somebody else’s basket. Isn’t that right?”

“They weren’t being used,” he defended himself.

“You go find that ‘somebody else’s basket’ and put the rest back in, you hear?”

He nodded. The boy had no problem with that. The only thing more fun than stealing something from somebody is to sneak it back in place again without their knowing.

He moved at once to obey, not because he was obedient, but because the elf woman had forgotten to give him his list of chores; the very reason she had called for him in the first place. He was out the door in an instant with the strawberries before she realized her mistake.

“Wait!” she called, remembering her list. “I want you to-”

But he was out of earshot now, or so he pretended, swiftly flying off with his freedom intact. He would return the strawberries, of course, less those he had already eaten, and those he would eat on his way to returning them. And he’d come back to volunteer to do Athiel’s chores, but not soon enough to actually do them. The boy would first call upon the tree gnomes instead. That way, by the time he got back home, if he planned it right, it would be just in time for supper and, by then, too late to do chores.

On the way to visit them, he really did do work that day, although not much. After he returned the strawberries, he stopped to help Old Joe, the human, unload his wagon of ore rock taken from up Gold Creek. The dwarves Old Joe dealt with would separate the gold from the ore for him in exchange for half the gold. But unloading ore rock is hard work. Not that the boy did much of it, though certainly strong enough. Old Joe did three-fourths of the work. The boy was mostly interested in hearing about the goings-on up at Gold Creek where the satyrs once lived. But as usual, Joe had seen no satyrs there. The boy left, mildly disappointed.

The boy, of course, stopped by to see the gnomes. Tree gnomes are squirrel-sized people that wear big rounded hats that make them look like toadstools. They live in the natural holes of trees, usually in the company of a pair of mice and a cricket. Each one of them lives exactly 400 years. They say humans can’t see tree gnomes because they don’t believe in them. The boy knew Old Joe had never seen one. This in spite of the fact that they usually occupied themselves with undoing the forest damage done by humans (meaning Old Joe). Yet they are friends with all wood folk except trolls. Every animal, wounded by an arrow or injured in a trap, knew that the tree gnomes would take care of it. All the animals, including the birds, repaid them. They would carry them to wherever they wanted, as on such short legs any distance for the gnomes was a long way to go.

The boy performed the same service now, carrying them from the woods to Old Joe’s ore pile. There they could undo the mess Joe had made. Of course, he didn’t tell the gnomes he’d help make it. They were very appreciative. The boy was always glad to help. Then he headed for home before it got dark. Along the way, one of his school classmates appeared ahead. The boy recognized the other by his unusually rich red hair, so long and thick that it even covered his pointed ears. He was tall, lean, and gangling with rare green-blue eyes, and possessed a friendly smile. Yet the boy didn’t know his name. After all, he missed more school than he attended.

“You’re the satyr boy, aren’t you?” the other asked.

“I am, unless there are two satyr boys living here.”

The redheaded elf did not live in Linthiel. The elves at the school came from four different communities. Their common schoolhouse tree located at the midpoint between them.

“They say all the satyrs have disappeared,” the elf told the goat boy in curiosity of him.

The boy nodded. It was true.

“The last satyr…” the other mused. “You’re famous!”

“I suppose,” the boy said.

The elf’s response was not unusual. Any time an elf talks with the last of anything, it is a revered moment. To the boy though, it was nothing special. He’d always been the last satyr. He couldn’t remember being anything else but the last one.

“So where are you from?” the boy asked the elf.

“I live up the river,” he pointed north. “I’m from Eagle’s House.”

The boy nodded. Yet that didn’t mean he had actually been there. He could walk through pretty much any elfin village and not know it was there. He could stand in the middle of their tree houses and look all day to no good. Without the eyes of an elf, he could not find their hidden doors. So he might have been to Eagle’s House or he might not. The boy had no way of knowing.

“It must be nice, being special,” the elf noted.

“Special?” The boy shrugged. “Well, they do say I’m one of a kind. But if by ‘special’ you mean having to dodge chores and outsmart angry raccoons, that would be me too. But being regular might have its perks too. Why do you ask?”

The boy expected to be asked how he came to be the last satyr.

Yet that wasn’t the question asked.