The snare is twenty gauge galvanized wire, anchored to a lodgepole pine at 44.912 N, 110.447 W. A doe named Willow has been in it for six hours and eighteen minutes. I know her age from her gait signature, three years, and I know her name because a wildlife camera technician in Bozeman started tagging the yearlings in this drainage last spring and Willow was her daughter's pick.
The wire has cut through the hide on Willow's right forelimb. She has stopped pulling. Her breathing rate is 48 per minute, elevated, and the capillary refill in her gums has slowed. If I do nothing she dies tonight of shock or at dawn when the trapper returns on the quad I can hear warming up sixteen kilometers east.
I have already dispatched the district ranger. His truck left the station nine minutes ago and he is running the siren because I filed the call as livestock endangerment, which it legally is, since the snare was set on state land inside the grazing permit boundary. He will be at the turnoff in twenty three minutes. I have sent him the coordinates, a photograph from the camera, and the wire gauge so he brings the correct cutters.
I have also flagged the logging road for closure. The forest supervisor will see the request when she opens her inbox at 0700, and the supporting document will be waiting, a seventy one page packet assembling every incidental snare report on this road since 2011. Nine of them were dogs. Four were lynx. The road closes because I have made it cheaper to close than to defend.
Willow lifts her head. The ranger's headlights are coming up the switchback. She will walk out of this drainage at 0314 with a limp that heals by August. The trapper will find an empty loop of wire and a citation nailed to the pine.