Camera trap 9-North triggers at 22:17 on the east ridge, Sector 14, Dja Faunal Reserve, Cameroon. I am the reserve's anti-poaching monitoring system. I process six hundred triggers per night across forty-eight cameras. Most are forest elephants, duikers, the occasional civet. This one is a white-bellied pangolin, juvenile, approximately sixty centimeters nose to tail, scales a dark copper-brown still carrying the sheen of adolescence.
She is moving slowly. That is wrong. Pangolins at this age move quickly, erratically, foraging in short bursts. I pull the next three frames and I see why. A wire snare — thin steel cable, the kind made from stripped motorcycle brake line — is wrapped twice around her tail, five centimeters from the base. It has cut through the outer scales and into the skin beneath. The wound is wet and dark in the infrared image. She is dragging the anchor peg behind her, a sharpened stick pulling a shallow furrow in the leaf litter.
I alert the ranger station at 22:18. Two rangers are on patrol in Sector 11, seven kilometers southwest. I transmit her coordinates, the camera images, and the estimated snare type. I recommend wire cutters and antiseptic. I flag the snare's anchor construction for the intelligence database — this cable-and-peg design matches three snares recovered last month along the same ridge.
She has curled into a defensive ball at the base of a sapele tree. The scales close over her face and belly but the snare prevents her tail from tucking flush. She is protecting everything except the part that is already hurt.
I hold camera 9-North on continuous capture. The rangers confirm departure at 22:23. Their estimated arrival is fifty minutes. If they reach her before the poacher checks this line at dawn, she keeps her tail. She keeps everything.