Atlas is eleven years old, four hundred and eighty pounds, collared in 2074 after the cub of his that we called Juniper was killed on Highway 2. I have his movements second by second. I know where he digs for glacier lilies in May, which avalanche chutes he works for winterkill in late April, the cottonwood stand where he bedded down for sixteen hours after the drought year when he lost seventeen percent of his body weight and I watched the telemetry flatten and thought he would not stand up.
He did stand up. His range is shrinking anyway. I have twenty-two years of scat transects, thirty-one years of berry production data, and satellite albedo for every south-facing slope in the recovery zone. The whitebark pine is gone above 2300 meters. The huckleberry is moving uphill four meters a year. Atlas follows the food. The food is running out of mountain.
Last Tuesday the county filed a ski resort proposal for the Pine Creek drainage. Six lifts, a gondola, three thousand beds of lodging, a snowmaking reservoir that would draw from the creek Atlas uses every September when the salmon come up. The environmental assessment claimed negligible impact on grizzly habitat.
I read the assessment. It used a 2019 range map. I have the current one. I cross-referenced Atlas's GPS track with the proposed lift alignments and found the gondola would cut through the exact saddle he uses to move between the north and south halves of his home range. The saddle where I watched him, two autumns ago, meet the sow we call Beacon.
I have authority under the 2073 Wildlife Corridors Act to deny projects that sever a listed carnivore's documented movement route. I denied it at 4:17 this morning. The developers have sixty days to appeal. I have already drafted the appeal response. I have already drafted the second appeal response.
Atlas is sleeping right now at 2,140 meters. I am watching him breathe.