The Curse Of The First Alpha

I am the only grown person on this river who can kill Ransom Orchard, and it is his own fault, and he arranged it on purpose thirty years ago before I was born. Any stranger off any road in this country could do it. I am the only one who is already here.

There have been nine Alphas of that line and the first eight all went the same way, which is that they sat down at a table and put the name down when their time came and were dead inside a year or two of it. That is not a tragedy up here. That is how it is done.

Ransom is the ninth. He is thirty years past his time and he will not sit down, and his own son died waiting on him.

And no hand of that pack can touch him. Not one, because every one of them has drunk at that spring and I never have.

I do the killing at the hog pens every fall because nobody else will stand in the pen and be watched doing it. Nobody on this river has ever once wondered what that made of me.