The First to Go

*Isabella*

“Do you think we’re really staying?” Alice whispers next to me in the dark. “Or will Uncle Tim talk Pa into taking us west?”

I let out a sigh and readjust on the bed we share. Across the room, I can hear Robert’s breaths and know he’s still awake. He used to share that bed with Joseph before our older brother became too sophisticated to sleep upstairs with us youngins. He sleeps on the cot next to the table now. Our parents’ bedroom is the only other room upstairs. I know they are lying awake now, too, talking about what happened.

“We ain’t going,” I tell Alice. She lets out a sigh, and I know she’s glad to hear that I don’t think we’ll be leaving the only home either of us has ever known. “You won’t have to say goodbye to your friends any time soon.”

“Good.” She yawns and rolls over, and I know it’s all settled in her little mind. So easy. So simple. We will stay, and that is that.

Robert shifts, too, and I have to wonder if he’s not thinking similar thoughts to the ones clouding my mind. He’s always been more like me, longing for something new, something unexpected. A wide open space to run free. He doesn’t have his wolf yet, but when they meet, he will be impossible to corral, just like Ma says I have always been.

It makes me smile to think of it. Even if I can’t go west right now, someday I think I will. I imagine my wolf running through grass so tall, even my human form would have trouble seeing over the top of it. In my mind, a herd of buffalo appears, and I am there, running alongside the monstrous beasts. I see myself plowing into one, knocking it over, sinking my teeth into its haunches.

I won’t be doing it alone, though. A large, handsome wolf will run alongside me. My mate. His shiny eyes will meet mine, and we will take on the buffalo and the world together. He’ll be just as handsome in his human form, and all the girls will wish they were the one to feel the bond with him. It makes me smile and almost giggle out loud, but I don’t want to explain myself to my brother and sister, so I hold it back.

I begin to drift off, letting my imagination morph into dreams of the freedom I feel pulling at my heart. But I haven’t quite reached a deep slumber when a noise in the distance rips through the night, and my eyes fly open.

A gunshot.

I’d know that sound anywhere. I’ve heard it a million times before. Our town isn’t lawless like some of the places we’ve heard tell of to the west, but we have our fair share of hunters who trespass on our lands or fools out messing around who meet up with the wrong folk.

Something about this particular noise has me sitting straight up in bed. I blink a few times, trying to register whether or not the sound was real or part of a dream I hadn’t quite gotten acquainted with yet. Robert and Alice are both asleep, their breaths coming even and slow, and outside my window, I hear only the normal sounds of night. The faint clip-clopping of horses’ hooves on roads blocks away. The whir of night creatures—bugs, toads, and the like. The rustle of the leaves on the trees outside of our window stirred by the spring breeze.

I swallow hard, noting my mouth is dry, and reach for the glass of water I always have next to the bed. Maybe it was a dream. Perhaps my particular field of bison was about to be invaded by gun toting humans who wanted their furs more than they needed their meat. I lie back down, studying the shadows cast across the ceiling, thinking I’ve overreacted to a dream.

Then, I hear the screams.

I recognize them immediately, even though they’re coming from a few houses away. Without a second thought, I fling the covers off my legs and reach for my robe, shoving my arms through and tying it tight before I slip my feet into the old pair of slippers Ma handed down to me earlier in the year when my feet got too big for my old ones. I hear Pa stir in my parents’ bedroom, hear him whisper to Ma to stay in bed, but I know she won’t, and when I throw open our door it’s her I nearly collide with.

“Go back to bed, Isabella.” Ma looks at me and nods in the direction of the still sleeping children, but I take her statement as more of a suggestion than an order. 

When Pa flies down the stairs, pulling his suspenders up over his shoulders as he goes, I’m hot on his tail. I catch up to him at the door, and he looks back at me for only a second. I see that recognition on his face; he knows I’m here, and he’s not sending me back to bed like Ma. With his acknowledgment, I follow him out into the night, hearing Joseph, who has always been a little slow to rouse, calling after us.

Ma is muttering under her breath that I should go back inside, but I follow Pa down the street with her trailing behind. The lamps are lit at my uncle’s house, and I can still hear Aunt Lena and Hanna hollering into the night. It’s all screeches and wails, and it’s Ma who has the good sense to shout down the road to the crowd that’s beginning to assemble to send for Doc Milligan, our pack healer. Mr. Campbell, an older gentleman, nods in our direction and turns to dash up the street to run Ma’s errand. Not too many people tell Reba Mackenzie no—with me being the primary exception, it seems.

I know what to expect when we make it into my aunt and uncle’s house. I’ve put the pieces of the puzzle together by now. But I’m still not completely prepared for it. Bright drops of red blood dot the porch. In the dim light, it’s hard to see, but I can smell them trailing off down the road, into the woods behind the house. Their land. Their home. When you’re a wolf shifter, it don’t matter. Humans will come onto your own territory and make you wish you’d never met your wolf.

Henry is in his human form, lying on the dining room table, a sheet thrown over him for modesty’s sake. His face is scrunched up in a grimace like nothin’ I’ve ever seen before, and the bright red spot on the sheet grows wider by the second as my aunt grasps his hand, crying and begging him not to go.

He’s younger than me. Just found his wolf. Now, he’s on the brink of crossing over, losing his life, and for what? So some human can feel proud and mighty? So a new homesteader can pretend they’re safer at night now without our kind prowling through the shadows?

I stay out of the way knowing why Ma didn’t want me to come. She crosses the room without hesitance and pulls the sheet down to reveal a bullet hole in Henry’s back. My uncle erupts in a fit of tears at the massive size of it. “Goddess, no!” he howls. “My boy!”

“We ain’t got time for none of that,” Ma tells him in a no-nonsense voice. “Get me the sharpest knife you have. Clean it first,” she says.

Uncle Tim nods and stumbles off toward the kitchen.

“Ain’t Doc Milligan comin’?” Aunt Lena sobs, holding onto Hanna for dear life.

“We don’t have time to waste waiting to see if he’s coming or not,” Ma tells them.

Pa rushes around her to the kitchen where Uncle Tim seems to have forgotten how to open drawers and comes back with what my mother has asked for, pausing to clean it with some sort of liquor before he hands it over.

Ma makes an incision, and Henry, who is as pale as death and lifeless up until that moment, grimaces but doesn’t so much as moan. She’s digging for the bullet in his back, and I find myself chewing on my thumb, praying she finds it easy. I can’t imagine how much pain my poor cousin is in.

Ma fishes it out with her finger, bloodied to her elbows, and plunks it on the table about the time Doc Milligan rushes in, blurry eyed but ready to do his duty. “Thank you, Mrs. Mackenzie,” he says. “I’ll take it from here.”

Ma steps aside, and Pa hands her something to wipe her hands off on, but we all know they won’t never be clean again. When Doc Milligan looks at the mess he’s inherited, he sighs and shakes his head. “He’s lost a lot of blood.”

Aune Lena breaks out into another fit of screams as my uncle wraps his arms around his girls. “Please, Doc. Please. You have to save him. You have to save my boy.”

The doctor gives a slow nod, but when I look into my ma’s face, I know the truth. I take a step back toward the window, wondering if maybe she was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have come. I ain’t never seen nobody die before, and I’m not sure I want to start right now, with my cousin. 

Flashes of memories come back to me. The two of us playing on the carpet in the living room next to the fireplace when we were knee-high to a grasshopper. Chasing him through the woods on a spring day. The time we snuck up on Hanna and put that frog down the back of her dress. A tear slides down my cheek, and I hastily wipe it away. Far as I know, cryin’ ain’t never brought anyone back to life so ain’t no sense in my thinkin’ it might now.

I feel it the moment it happens. It’s not a sound or a change in countenance or anything a person can resolve as proof that it’s happened, not in a split second that is, but I knew the moment my cousin left this earth to be with the Moon Goddess. A small shudder went up my spine, and everything stopped moving for a moment, even the earth. Then, the others caught on, and the screaming shook the floors as my aunt near followed right behind him, and my mother tried her best to keep her brother’s family together.

I looked at Pa, and in that moment I knew what was going to happen. I knew what the next day would bring, and that on down the line, there’d be a lot more moments just like this one with people dying while other people screamed and begged them to stay.

And somewhere, deep down, I think Pa and me both knew one of those people dying was gonna be me.