The satyr had lost sight of her, fleeing from him in such a limb-tumble of diaphanous panic that his groin’s fleshy scepter stiffened into oak, threatening to burble over its pearls and gouts at the sound of those wan little cries, hooked like songbirds on her fat stabbing sobs. He paused at the trail’s fork, puffing his cheeks and capping his knob’s gurgle with a warty palm. The snake caught his eye first. Green as toad-belly, esssing and raveling from the hang of berries, then straight as a witch’s wand, fangs shown at the prow of its body’s arc, and hiding in the hide-and-seek moan of the crouching girl. The snake recoiled as the girl exploded from shelter into stumbling flight, skirt left tattering behind on the puppet spring of the bouncing thorns. Her sudden nakedness, the bright snakebite with its close-set weeping eyes, the satyr yelped to see such luck spreading before him, to delight his afternoon. Eight paces behind and he could smell the girl’s freshness, a storm of flowers to hood his roaring head. She tripped and teetered, dizzy as spring’s first lamb. And fell to earth as he fell upon her. She screamed and straddled her shadow as he shouted and straddled her, filling her freshness, fouling her till she choked and quivered, venom racing her veins, suppling her to sleep. The satyr wrenched and bucked, spouted a monosyllable of praise to the killing gods, then rolled loose, small white stillness nestled at his heaving side. He closed his eyes and snored the sky down, floating close and leaden to cover them. Dusk and bells, torches and calling voices, one Eurydice! followed by another. The satyr rose, wiped his dribble on a hawthorn leaf, stole away into the woods, fistful of girl-hair held to his nostrils.