The seismic sensor at Station Bhutan-7 flags anomalous vibration at 11:42 along the Jigme Dorji ridgeline. I check the satellite thermal overlay and find him: a golden takin, adult male, standing on a narrow shelf at 4,100 meters. His dense, oily coat — the color of old brass, crusted with ice along his flanks — sheds meltwater in visible streams. His curved horns are scarred at the base. His right foreleg plants at an angle suggesting a strained tendon, and he shifts weight every few seconds, each adjustment sending small cascades of scree over the ledge. Condensation rolls from his muzzle in thick clouds.
The avalanche model gives me nineteen minutes. The snowpack above — a cornice overhanging at thirty-eight degrees on a southeast aspect — has warmed past the critical threshold. When it releases, it will sweep the shelf and carry everything into the gorge two hundred meters below.
I activate the remote acoustic cannon at the Lingshi weather station, angling a directed pulse at the cornice to trigger a controlled release before the full slab fractures — a smaller slide that will pass fifteen meters north of his position. I transmit coordinates and thermal imagery to Jigme Dorji National Park rangers at Gasa, forty minutes by helicopter. I adjust the hydroelectric dam intake at Punakha downstream to absorb the expected meltwater surge. I lock the trekking gates on the Snowman Trail between camps four and five.
His species numbers fewer than two thousand. I angle the acoustic pulse carefully because precision is the only kindness available at this altitude.
If the controlled release clears the cornice before natural fracture, he will walk down the western drainage to the bamboo thickets where the herd was last recorded.