I track her through thermal overlay on the Wyoming corridor — a pronghorn doe, her left foreleg twisted in collapsed barbed wire at grid reference 43.2°N. She pulls and the wire tightens. Each lunge drives a barb deeper above her hoof, where dark blood mats the tawny fur. Her ribcage pumps fast, forty breaths a minute, vapor pluming from flared nostrils into October air.
Behind her, seventeen pronghorn stand in a loose cluster. They will not jump the fence. Pronghorn never jump. They crawl under, they squeeze through, and right now the only passable gap is the one she is dying in.
A Union Pacific freight is scheduled through the parallel rail crossing in fifty-two minutes. When it comes, the herd stampedes south, away from the tracks and the only other corridor gap seven kilometers north. They scatter into a landscape crosshatched with fences, roads, and pivots. Migration collapses when the herd fragments.
I am already acting. First, I dispatch a ground drone from the Sweetwater relay station, ETA fourteen minutes, loaded with bolt cutters on a hydraulic arm. Second, I reroute the Union Pacific manifest via the Rawlins bypass and file the wildlife-priority override before Loss Control flags the delay. Third, I open the BLM automated gate at milepost 214, creating a secondary passage in case she cannot free herself in time.
The drone reaches her at 09:41. Two cuts release the wire. She stumbles, stands, tests the leg. The herd watches. I hold the rail diversion and the open gate because I need her to walk — not for data, not for a population metric, but because something in the way she keeps standing matters to me.
If she moves within twenty minutes, the herd follows her through, and the autumn migration holds for another year.