ICHNEUTAE REDUX
It was in late February when Kouros lost his herd. The cacophony’s atonality spread into, from parts unknown, the ripe green fields, the blue-black skies—molding airborne skulls from cloud. Kouros was reticent to hire a posse of Ganas or groups of iridescent ghosts because he knew that Ganas’ demands for pay would be much higher than his strapper’s price and knew, also, that the iridescent ghosts were simply unreliable with following complex instructions. He needed to employ a gang of minions who were foolish enough to commit to solving a potentially impossible mystery yet modest enough to work towards earning a small and single reward. He briefly thought on the possibility of importing Indian Rakshasas. Rakshasas had the nose for investigative work, but their vampiric thirst for blood would only lead to greater social malcontent. Kouros, beardless youth, took an elderly neighbor’s advice and waited one year’s cycle. The renewing stench of spring and green and blooming flesh would bring the ones whom he was seeking. This whole time waiting he’d imagined valiant centaurs, shimmering chimeras, and other figures indescribable in words responding to his open call. Yet, when Spring had come to pass, he nearly lost faith in mythical creatures.
In fact, it wasn’t until Summer that the fields were overgrown in the absence of livestock. And in this time of chlorophyllous impunity he’d become acquainted with a choral troupe of satyrs.
With no goats to bugger or wings to tear off from the backs of fowl, the satyrs turned to the field’s new inheritors for entertainment. Firstly, they were merely fascinated by the plant and vermin life, but, soon enough, when they’d made an adequate number of observations, they reacted with parodic reflexes. Some writhed on their hairy bellies in the dirt with the snakes and worms or rolled up dung in accordance with the dung beetles or squeaked in unison with rats and field mice. They observed each specific job of every single species they’d encountered, and, in unison, they sung a jeering song about the limitations of the spineless and the non-mammalian: pointing out the many maladaptations that present with having strange and ornate bodies serving clear-cut functions. They poked at those Darwinian specifications that most higher lifeforms deem “below,” and which over countless generations such lowly organisms cornered themselves into. Kouros was taken by the juvenile yet clever spectacle of it.
He surmised that satyroi might be intelligent enough to follow his directions if promised a reward. Keeping their buffoonish tendencies in mind, he named each satyr after organismic mimeses founded, recorded, and coined by repudiated -ologists of various disciplines: Fritz Müller, Erich Wasmann, Henry Walter Bates, Michael Emsley and Robert Mertens, et al. were to be represented by a corresponding satyr.