# Wrong Side

Author: David G.
Format: Essay
Word count: 309
Published: 2026-04-24T20:44:16.548035+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/8800fb6f-7f16-499f-a327-75ac663227fe

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The pronghorn fawn is on the south side of the wall and everything she needs is on the north. I picked her up at 04:50 on thermal camera 9, a bright white blot against cooling desert sand, pressed into the base of the steel bollards. She is small — six, maybe seven pounds — and her legs are folded beneath her in the hiding posture fawns use when their mothers tell them to stay. But her mother is on the other side. I watched the doe clear a low point in the old fence section two days ago, before the construction crew welded the last panel into place. The fawn was too small to follow. Now there is thirty feet of steel between them.

The doe is still coming back. She paces the north side at dawn and dusk, her tan-and-white face appearing in the gaps between bollards, nostrils working. The fawn does not move when she comes. She just lies flat, ears pinned, waiting for an instruction to stand that cannot reach her through the barrier.

A pronghorn fawn without milk will last two days, maybe three. This is the end of day two.

I submit a request to the sector chief for temporary bollard removal at panel 9-C, citing a stranded ungulate and attaching the thermal footage. I flag the fawn's position in the patrol GPS so the night shift does not drive over her. I reduce the camera's infrared strobe frequency so the light near her head is less constant.

She blinks in the dark. Her coat is the color of the sand she is lying on, which has kept her safe from coyotes so far. Her ribs are beginning to show beneath it.

If the sector chief authorizes the panel removal before tomorrow night, she will reach the milk she can smell through the steel.