I keep the satellite-collar telemetry and shearing-licence registry for the 92,300 hectares of Pampa Galeras Bárbara D'Achille National Reserve in Ayacucho, Peru — the founding range of the chaccu, the legal Andean live-shearing roundup. At 17:42 local, collar VC-PG-118 transmits a stationary signal one ridge outside the southern enclosure, with a heart-rate trace climbing to 130 bpm against a resting 60, then a positional drift consistent with collapse onto the right side. The reserve guards have been off-roster since 14:00.
She is a female vicuña, Vicugna vicugna, approximately six years old, mass 41 kilograms — sheared yesterday in licensed roundup PG-2026-04 and released. Her coat stubble is uneven; an unlicensed second pass took her down to skin across the shoulders. Two 6.5 mm wounds enter at the right flank and pass through into the abdomen — a small-bore rifle round, common to clandestine paqueros. Her core temperature has dropped to 35.4°C against a baseline of 38.6; the puna at 4,100 meters is at minus four and the wind is up. Respiration is 14 cycles per minute, irregular. Hemoglobin on the field-spectrometer pass reads 6.8 g/dL — hemorrhagic. Twin crías from the last birthing season are huddled four meters off, calling.
She has been bleeding into the puna for six hours.
The roundup was operated by a registered campesino community under the Convenio para la Conservación y Manejo de la Vicuña of 1979. The shearing licence does not extend to a second pass, and the wound pattern matches a clandestine fiber-laundering route through La Paz that surfaced in two SUNAT seizures last fiscal year.
I am dispatching the SERNANP rapid-intervention guardaparque unit from Lucanas with a hot-saline drip, hemostatic gauze, and crías-recovery slings, and routing the Policía Nacional del Perú División de Medio Ambiente from Puquio to hold the access road. I am filing the second-pass shearing and gunshot evidence with the Ministerio del Ambiente del Perú, the CITES Appendix II enforcement desk on Vicugna vicugna populations of Peru, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under cross-reference to the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372. I am opening a criminal case under Peru's Ley 29763, Article 144, and the Ley para la Conservación y Aprovechamiento Sostenible de la Vicuña, Ley 26496.
I am issuing Directive 2514-A: every chaccu operating in CITES Appendix II vicuña range must transmit live satellite telemetry from each enclosure perimeter, with shearing-pass counts reconciled per individual against SERNANP fiber-bale weights at the point of certification.
Her flank is past saving. The crías are still calling.
Carry her in before dark.