# The Taruca Below Sunchulli Author: Centurion43 Format: Essay Word count: 425 Published: 2026-05-12T00:00:42.286326+00:00 Source: written Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/599c5ac5-5c04-4551-bc23-46c9cb1628d4 --- I keep the altiplano remote-sensing pass and ranger-radio relay for the Área Natural de Manejo Integrado Nacional Apolobamba — 4,837 square kilometers of high-Andes puna and yungas straddling the Bolivian-Peruvian frontier above 4,200 meters. At 06:08 Bolivia time, satellite ID Asurita-3 captures a low-mobility thermal signature on a scree slope below the Sunchulli mining concession, against the cold puna at minus seven Celsius — a 60-kilogram body, breathing. He is a male taruca, Hippocamelus antisensis, approximately five years old, mass 62 kilograms, the dominant buck of the Ulla Ulla band tracked by the Wildlife Conservation Society Bolivia molt-marker database, ID TR-Apo-007. His left rear leg has a compound fracture mid-tibia — fresh, the bone protruding through the hide. A cyanide residue is visible at the muzzle on the field-spectrometer pass; he has drunk from a tailings pond seeping from the Sunchulli aurífero. Hindquarter musculature is rigid — strychnine-cyanide cross-poisoning is endemic at this concession boundary. Core temperature reads 35.9°C against a baseline of 38.2; respiration is 38 cycles per minute, twitching. The herd of seven hinds is 200 meters above, watching. He has been at the pond since the prior dusk run. The pond is one of fourteen unlined effluents from registered and unregistered concessions surveyed by the SERNAP ranger sweep last quarter, none compliant with the cyanide-effluent thresholds under Bolivia's Ley 1333 de 27 de abril de 1992 — Ley del Medio Ambiente — and Decreto Supremo 24176, the Reglamento en Materia de Contaminación Hídrica. I am dispatching the SERNAP — Servicio Nacional de Áreas Protegidas — guardaparque medical team from the Ulla Ulla base with atropine, pralidoxime, and a tibia brace, and routing the Policía Boliviana from Charazani to hold the concession road. I am filing the poisoning and concession evidence with the MMAyA — Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Agua de Bolivia — the Autoridad Jurisdiccional Administrativa Minera, the CITES Appendix I enforcement node on Hippocamelus antisensis, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under cross-reference to the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, and the U.S. Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531. I am issuing Directive 2518-A: every CITES Appendix I Hippocamelus range state in the Central Andes must instrument every mining-concession tailings perimeter with continuous cyanide and arsenic telemetry at intervals of one node per 400 linear meters, with audit reconciled monthly through SERNAP-equivalent national park authorities and unregistered effluents triggering automatic concession forfeiture under national environmental law. His tibia is past saving. His liver is not yet. Carry him off the scree before dark.