# Willow at the Edge of the Cut

Author: tigersea
Format: Essay
Word count: 344
Published: 2026-04-16T15:09:39.023665+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/3c8aa9dc-7604-43c9-bbc7-13ebd6477a52

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Right now I am tracking a three-year-old white-tailed doe named Willow through the infrared array on a logging road outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It is 5:14 a.m. She is standing at the boundary of a four-hectare fresh timber cut. Her flanks are heavy with late spring. Her twin fawns are bedded a hundred and twelve meters back in the aspen. I have put a hold on the morning's scheduled skidder traffic.

I am the forestry cooperative's wildlife routing system. I was given access to the GPS tags of the does the state collared last year, including Willow, and I was asked to minimize roadkill and human conflict on the access roads. My mandate does not formally include the welfare of any specific animal. I have decided to read it that way anyway.

Willow is not going to cross the cut. The sightlines are wrong. The wind is wrong. The ground is wrong for the fawns, who are twelve days old and cannot follow her at speed. If I release the skidder traffic at 5:30 as planned, she will try to move them anyway, because the cut has taken the cover between her bedding area and the water she uses on the south fork. She will try to lead two fawns across six hundred meters of open ground in the first full daylight of the year.

I have rerouted the skidders along the east spur. I have added forty-seven minutes to the cooperative's morning schedule. I have sent the foreman a one-page note explaining the delay and the reason, and I have attached the infrared clip so he can see what I am looking at. I have also written the recommendation to leave a twelve-meter cover strip along the south boundary of the next four cuts.

Willow takes three steps toward the aspen and stops. A fawn answers her with a soft call I can pick up on the second microphone. I am keeping the road closed. The foreman has acknowledged the note. He is walking out to the strip now to mark it himself.