At a stirring in the orchard, she sharply turns.
monument-still she watches, lopes on.
Her mottled grey more coyote-like than *****,
The fiery orange long gone from her wasted frame,
Her once-bushed tail, now hairless, drooping.

An aged ***** in her last winter, moved to stalk
in daylight, up the orchard to the treeline,
Once the hill's best hunter; each year her kits
ferocious players near the now dry brook,
Does she dream, I wonder, of those springs?

Leave her now to time, deep-denned,
where the last sleep's call ends hunger,
hid from the season's creeping chill.
Better there to finish than a trapper's snare,
Better this quiet ending in the *****'s lair.