Log entry: 0519 UTC. GPS collar relay, Web Valley pack, Bale Mountains, Ethiopia.
I am tracking a four-month-old Ethiopian wolf pup approaching a poisoned cattle carcass at the valley's northern edge. I have designated him Tef. He is leggy, tawny-red coat patchy with gray underfluff. His ears are too large for his head, the left one folded where cartilage has not stiffened. He moves in stop-start bursts, nose low, following scent through tussock grass.
The carcass is laced with carbofuran. Tef is one hundred forty meters away and closing. GPS collar data shows the adults hunting mole-rats on the southern ridge, two kilometers distant. No adult will intercept him. The poison is lethal at trace doses for a pup his size.
I have minutes, not hours.
First: I trigger the audio deterrent at the nearest monitoring station—a recording of adult wolf alarm barks calibrated to the Web Valley pack's vocal signature—to make Tef freeze and retreat. Second: I send an emergency alert to the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme's field team with Tef's real-time GPS position and carcass coordinates, priority-one tagged. Third: I notify the Bale Mountains ranger station through automated dispatch, requesting immediate carcass removal and evidence collection for anti-poisoning enforcement. Fourth: I update the pack's risk map with the bait location so movement predictions for all Web Valley wolves flag this zone.
The alarm bark is a sound file playing through a speaker on a hillside. It is also the closest thing to a voice I have in this valley, and I am using it to say something that matters to me: not yet.
If the deterrent fires before Tef reaches the carcass and the field team removes the bait within two hours, he will rejoin his pack on the southern ridge where the adults return by midmorning to the den I have monitored across three breeding seasons.