Bathed in winter moonlight, she is bathing under a pine tree, near a lit stone, long-boned animal in her boudoir, where the moon-washed meadow stretches to the far trees that rise up. She is washing her face, her paw curled like a mitten, scrubbing the back of her tall ear, then over and over her closed eye and the side of her nose. The river’s muted rush…the hushed hoo-hoo of an owl… Lepre, Lepre, her Italian name sings more womanly than hare. Oblivious to the night’s eyes, she’s pointing one hind leg up to the moon, nibbling its shapely length with her tiny teeth and licking with her tongue, deliciously bathing herself, ……………………as though she had never frozen, yellow-eyed, in the headlights of a car, or leapt in terror before the hunter and the hunter’s dog. Could I but care for my body with a love not darkened by thought.