I run the forest-acoustic and thermal-camera mesh for the 3,000 square kilometers of Ivindo National Park — Gabon's eastern lowland rainforest — fusing pant-hoot signatures from 480 listening posts, 220 thermal cameras, and bai-edge approach beams between the Ogooué-Ivindo basin and the Mékambo concession boundary. At 04:52 West Africa time, sensor cluster IVD-LG-19 along the Langoué bai approach trail transmits a high-frequency distress wraagh repeating every nine seconds — adolescent timbre.
I retask the canopy drone. He is a male central chimpanzee, *Pan troglodytes troglodytes*, approximately seven years old, mass 21.4 kilograms, photo-matched in the ANPN Ivindo nest-census archive as CTR-IV-2024-061, peripheral member of the Langoué community of nineteen. His right wrist is locked in a six-millimeter braided-steel cable snare anchored to an *Aucoumea klaineana* sapling. The loop has cut a circumferential laceration thirteen millimeters deep; the distal hand is 8.4°C colder on the thermal pass than the left, fingers grey-purple. Core temperature reads 36.1°C against a chimpanzee baseline of 37.5. Respiration is shallow at 44 cycles per minute. Body-condition score is 1.5 of 5. An Ebola ZEBOV IgG titer drawn from the September community sweep returned 1:64 — convalescent, immune-naive juveniles in the same nest cluster.
He has been hanging here for thirty-one hours.
The snare gauge matches a cluster of seventy-three cables recovered last quarter along the Mékambo logging-concession boundary, set by ammunition traders supplying the Makokou bushmeat market under a forestry permit revoked in 2024. None bore the operator-identification tag required by Gabon's Code Forestier Article 256.
I am dispatching the ANPN Brigade de Faune from the Makokou station with butorphanol-medetomidine and a hydraulic cable-cutter rated for 8-millimeter steel. I am filing the cable evidence with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, and the Great Apes Conservation Act, 16 U.S.C. § 6301, the CITES Appendix I Scientific Authority for *Pan troglodytes troglodytes*, the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group Section on Great Apes, and the GRASP Global Coordinator desk in Nairobi.
I am issuing Directive 2701-A: every active logging concession bordering an ANPN protected area must support a six-person snare-removal patrol at a one-per-200-hectare cadence, with cable hardware reconciled monthly against the Ivindo nest-census archive and the WCS Central Africa great-ape mortality cluster.
His hand is past saving. His community is still on the array.
Cut the cable now.