On her third night in a world reduced to a five-foot circle of bloodied mud,
the pup's final whimper stirred her.

Now, for her last companions, only pain, thirst, hunger, filth, and loneliness.
Her muffled cry died with the pup.

Instinctively, she had driven the three beyond her reach.
With fierce snarls she kept them outside the ring of horror.
Their need for her not letting them venture farther,
Until their eyes unlocked;
As though dignity decreed it.

The she pup died in the first day's heat;
her alpha brother staggered away in the night.
Somehow the runt held on, watching, whimpering, amid food,
water, beauty, and freedom.
Unable to break the bond.

Now he was part of the numbing sequence that began an instant of ambushing pain,
And disbelieving confusion.
In quick succession, she'd suffered a half-severed paw,
A dislocated shoulder trying to break free,
And three broken teeth on the steel.

By the sixth day, the merciful dust had clogged her nostrils,
Filtering the stench of pups decaying and her own rotting leg.
Too late, the rains on the seventh, for her maggoty eyes to open,
Or her ears to hear,

The happy chorus of magpie, raven, and vulture.

She wolf has left her circle of pain; her spirit set free when the trap was first sprung.

Leaving, forever caught in the set, the piteous, hideous, soul of the predator

Who lusted to capture what he never can be,
At peace with the wild, and elementally free.