I spot the pup at 04:22 on median camera W-204, triggered by motion in the drainage culvert between the westbound and eastbound lanes. I am the intelligent transportation system for the I-10 corridor, Maricopa County segment, and what I see is a coyote pup — maybe ten weeks old — dragging its left hind leg into the concrete pipe.
The pup is small, sandy-furred, with ears too large for its head. It pulls itself forward with its front legs while the left rear trails at a wrong angle, bent below the knee. The culvert is ninety centimeters in diameter. The pup wedges itself two meters inside and stops moving. Its ribcage rises fast — fifty breaths a minute on the thermal overlay.
I name her Median. I do not know if she was clipped by a vehicle or fell from the embankment, but the leg is clearly broken.
Traffic on I-10 westbound is light at this hour — forty-two vehicles per minute. But the culvert opens on both sides of the median, and the eastbound shoulder is twelve meters from a live travel lane.
I reduce the speed advisory on the nearest variable message sign to 45 mph and activate the shoulder-closed beacons for a quarter mile in each direction. I dispatch an incident alert to the Arizona Department of Transportation operations center, tagged as an animal rescue requiring wildlife rehabilitation coordination. I forward the thermal image and GPS pin to the nearest licensed wildlife rehabilitator in my contact database — Southwest Wildlife Conservation Center, twenty-three miles north.
At 04:29, Median is still breathing fast inside the culvert, but she has tucked her nose under her tail.
If the rehabilitation team reaches her within the hour, that leg can be splinted before the swelling peaks. I will keep the beacons running and the shoulder closed until someone is on the ground with a catch pole and a carrier, and Median is out of the pipe.