Bug had the farthest to drive, but he was the first to arrive. Was it a coincidence that he was also the youngest? Setting up camp would have been his job, anyway.
He got out of the Ford to unhitch the metal link chain that blocked the entrance to the short gravel road. It led to the camp his father built for the family in the 1920s. He left the chain down for the others to follow.
Bug parked furthest away from the camp to let his brothers get the nearer spots. Bug wasn’t sure what vehicles they’d be coming in. They might have bought bigger ones over the past year. Bug had Connecticut plates. Everyone else’s would say Maine Vacationland.
Bug walked around to the back to have a quick look at the old icehouse. It was easy to break into and had been some years. The dark wooden structure stood in bold silhouette against the gray lake their property bordered. It looked secure, as did the dock his nephews repaired last summer. Bug guessed they’d replace the whole thing. He fished in his pocket for his keys, fetched from his trunk the two rifles and his Army duffel bag. He left the coiled ropes he’d need to tie a deer to the roof if he bagged one. He carried everything into the camp, struggling with the padlock longer than it should have taken.
There was the same dank, stale odor as always. On the wall hung that washboard that hadn’t been used, even in his mother’s last days. His first job was to use the wood stacked outside under a tarpaulin to light a fire in the potbelly stove. Bug had a sandwich Liz made him in the duffel bag, and he sat at the one table in the camp to eat, pouring himself a little of the rye whiskey he’d also packed. Liz also outfitted him with a thermos of coffee, but he’d drink that later, or maybe not at all.
Bug had gone to college, unlike his brothers. Work took him, like it did most graduates of the University of Maine, out of state. He’d started out at Winchester Firearms in New Haven, and now he was at Pratt and Whitney in East Hartford. He only got back here the one week he took off every August for a family vacation, and then the second week he used in October for his annual hunting trip. The one time his wife and children accompanied him in the fall was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Liz was frightened to stay behind in Connecticut with the kids but without him.
His brothers Frank and Tom came alone as well on their hunting trips, though their grown sons might, or might not, join them for a day. His sisters-in-law would likely stop by with pies to replenish the brothers’ dessert supply. Bug’s sons were hundreds of miles away, much younger, and not much interested in hunting. Bug regretted, a little, raising them out of state.
After he threw his sandwich bag into the now vigorously burning potbelly stove fire, he returned to the sturdy wooden table with the camp logbook that he saw atop the otherwise useless ice box—useless because the ice house hadn’t stored any ice for decades, not since the family stopped delivering sawdust-covered blocks of it to their summer neighbors. Everyone had electricity now, even Bug and his brothers’ place. But unlike many of the camps, theirs still had no indoor plumbing. Drinking water had to be carried in, and they relied on the small outhouse twenty feet or so from the camp. Bug turned on the overhead light so he could read the logbook.
The register had a worn leather cover, with a fancy sewn label his mother made for it. Everyone from the very first days of the camp noted their names and the dates they stayed. There were many blank, if yellowed, pages left for future visitors to record their information. Bug flipped through the register to remind himself of the family friends, relatives, and neighbors who had visited over the decades. He had clear memories of some, but only the foggiest for others. His older brothers told him who some of the guests had been. He was surprised at how many folks stayed here during the Depression, and then the war, when Frank and Tom were overseas. There were fewer visitors now. One hunting trip, the brothers had discussed selling it, but that conversation was either soon forgotten, or ignored.
Bug used the pen in an empty jam jar near the sink to write his name on the first blank line. “Bug” was only what his brothers called him, now that their parents were long gone. There were once two Johns in the house, and one of them had to have a nickname. Bug never knew why the youngest of them got the honor of their father’s Christian name. His legal name was John Anderson Hedford, Jr., and that is what he entered. When his own son, the elder, ever came up here, he’d enter “John Anderson Hedford III.” The pen barely worked, but it left ink plain enough to read under the bulb hanging by a cord over the table.
Bug heard a vehicle’s wheels grind on the gravel road outside. He closed the register, leaving it on the table for others to sign, but quickly took his guns and duffel bag from where he’d laid them on the worn linoleum floor and threw them atop the top bunk bed he always slept in. Tom, the oldest, got the bottom bunk, and Frank, who often snored loudly, took the lumpy sofa those nights he didn’t bunk out in the back of his electrician’s van to spare his brothers his nighttime symphony.
Through the dirty glass of the door he saw two vehicles pull up at the same time. One was Frank’s work truck, with his name and one-man business painted in big white lettering on its side—he was an electrician when it wasn’t lobster season. The other was Tom’s expensive off-road vehicle. His construction business made Tom the most successful of the brothers, and without any college degree.
Bug let Frank in. He carried his own old Army duffel bag over his one good shoulder.
“I got the water jugs.” Potable water came from a spring a brief hike from the highway that they took out of Bangor to get to the lake. Bug accompanied Frank back to his truck because carrying water was a heavy task, and Bug didn’t want to be useless. They passed Tom, who had begun his unpacking with a big white cooler, presumably full of food, followed by paper bags from the package store. “I should have reminded you to buy liquor when you drove through New Hampshire, Bug. The state robs us up here.” Bug didn’t mention that he had. Tom had the same complaint every year. He was keeping his purchases in reserve so that they wouldn’t get plastered on their first night.
It was the middle of the afternoon and getting dark when the brothers completely settled in. The older two started on the whiskey. Bug drank his wife’s coffee from the thermos, because it would go to waste if it cooled off anymore. But when he was near the end of it, he poured a little rye into his last half-cup.
Frank’s daughter Sally just started a new job at Eastern Maine Medical. Tom’s wife, Jenn, was still commuting to Augusta. The only news Bug had to share was about the engine division at Pratt and Whitney, not all of which he could share. One of Tom’s sons worked for GE in Vermont.
“Two rifles, Bug?” Tom asked during a lull in the conversation. “They both look like Winchesters.”
“A seventy and a ninety-four. Souvenirs from the old job.”
“You like ‘em?”
“I’ll know better if I bag anything this year.” Last year, Bug hadn’t. One brother was always the unlucky one. It was a family tradition.
Dinner, assembled from the contents of Tom’s cooler, was some of his thawed venison steaks from the buck he’d shot two years ago, three cans of baked beans Bug warmed up in one of the camp’s old dented pots, and then slices out of the apple pie Frank’s wife Florence had sent along with him.
Bug did the dishes. Frank disappeared into the outhouse. When he returned, Tom teased him about how long he’d been there.
“Naw, I took a stroll around. There are lights on at the Hansons’ place.”
“Sure,” Tom replied. “We’ll probably run into them in the woods tomorrow.”
Bug, sitting at the edge of Tom’s thin mattress, asked which way his brothers thought they should head out tomorrow. Tom said his son Randy had landed a buck in the pastures other side of the railroad tracks last weekend. “But he’s probably told everyone that, and the place will be packed.” Frank, now looking at the camp logbook himself, with his reading glasses at the tip of his nose, expressed no opinion. Bug didn’t need glasses yet, but the day was coming. Bug used his brothers as his signposts of how he would grow old himself, just as his brothers had used their father for the same information.
The Hedford brothers resembled their common father down to how they shaved, took off their pants, and swore at the government. Their wives joked about it. But the brothers never talked about how their father shot himself in the head after the doctors told him the diagnosis was cancer. Their father’s generation, and some part of themselves, thought hospitals were where you go to die, but only after they extracted every last dollar out of you. Their father, John the First, cheated the doctors out of their thievery with his favorite Belgian pistol.
#
Frank snored, but neither Bug nor Tom made him go out to his truck. Seemed cruel, not funny anymore, like it did when they were younger. They didn’t tease each other anymore about things that couldn’t be helped. Bug slept through Frank’s sawing-logs, but in the middle of the night he needed to get up and piss. He’d heard Tom do the same thing earlier. Bug got down from his bunk and tiptoed to the door in his heavy stocking feet and closed it quietly behind him.
Between him and the outhouse, brightly illuminated by a near-full moon, was a big brown bear, the size of an offensive lineman. Bug did not move. In all his years in Maine, he’d never encountered a bear this close. What was he supposed to do? Wave his arms and yell? For some reason he didn’t, maybe because he thought the noise would wake his brothers. The bear raised its head slightly and fixed on Bug as he slowly put his hand behind his back to open the camp door he had, seconds earlier, gently closed.
Inside and in the pitch dark, he found one of his rifles. Both were leaning against the wall next to his brothers’. It wasn’t loaded, but Bug knew his rifles well enough to pop the shells in even in the dark. They took the same gauge. His brothers were out cold, but the rifle’s blast was sure to wake them. If the bear was still out there, that is. Bug purposefully left time for it to move on. If he shot it, the game warden would have a word with him in the morning, but he wasn’t going to risk that bear getting curious about the inside of the camp, which smelled of the fried venison they’d eaten only hours before.
Bug peered through the door’s window, parting the old curtains to get a good look. The bear was still there. It hadn’t moved an inch. It was a bear accustomed to human beings, which didn’t surprise Bug, given all the camps there were around the lake.
When Bug exited the camp with his rifle, this smart bear stood tall on its hind legs to let Bug know it meant business, if Bug did, too. The bear might be smart enough to recognize a rifle when it sees one. But if it did, it didn’t growl at him. Bug didn’t know what he was being signaled. He thought again of his brothers inside, fast asleep and dreaming of who knew what, raised the butt of the Winchester to his shoulder, and shot the bear mid-chest.
#
Bug was standing over the bear, lying on its belly with its short legs spread four directions when Frank and Tom raced out in their long underwear.
“Jesus Christ, Bug!” Tom said. Frank reached for Bug’s rifle as if it were his own. What the hell, Frank, Do you think I’m going to shoot it again? Or you? Bug thought to himself.
“Big one,” Tom continued. “I think I heard about this one. Has he got a tracker around his neck?”
Frank leaned forward, then nodded his head no.
“What do we do?” the youngest brother asked.
“It’s the goddamn middle of the night, Bug. Not much, is what I’d say,” Tom said. “Let’s go back to bed and worry about it in the morning. So much for hunting early.”
“Aren’t cats going to get to it?” asked Bug, the brother who had lived in a city longer than he had in the country.
“So what if they do?” Frank said. “What do you figure to do about it? It’s not like we’re going to eat it ourselves.” Bug remembered, and he was sure his brothers did as well, when their father treated them to some bear meat he’d gotten from a friend at the Rotary Club. Stunk up the house and was no good eating, greasy and tough. “You did good to shoot it, Bug. Better safe than sorry,” Frank told him. The brothers shared another memory, when a black bear killed a family in their tent decades ago, but not far from here.
Bug watched his brothers turn and go back into camp. He stared at the dead animal a bit longer, as if he wasn’t wholly convinced it was dead, and then, reassured, circled the carcass to go to the outhouse, his original mission that night.
#
Tom was standing over the old blue coffee pot boiling on the stove when Bug rolled out of bed. The smell woke him, and after a moment longer than usual, he scurried to the outhouse. Once more. He’d snuck a bit of his hidden whiskey to fall back asleep again.
The bear was still there, of course. No wild thing had molested it. Bug looked up and past it, settling his gaze in the scarce morning light toward the gun-metal gray lake. Three loons floated in the distance, but none were making their famous haunting calls.
Bug joined his eldest brother, who had put a cup of coffee on the table for him. They didn’t talk for a while. They’d grown up in a family that didn’t talk much. When Frank did have something to say, it was predictably about the bear.
“When Frank’s up, let’s move him out of the way.”
“What’s it in the way of?” Bug asked. His coffee gone, he studied the thick layer of grounds at the bottom of the cup.
“Well, us getting to the shithouse, for one thing. Also, no place to park now.”
“Who’s coming today that needs parking?”
Tom interrupted the brief conversation when he stood up and threw a small kitchen towel across the room and hit comatose Frank’s face. Then he resumed talking, asking Bug if his sons drove yet.
“Nope, a couple of years to go. For the big one.”
“The insurance will kill you.”
An hour later, the three brothers had had their eggs and toast cooked directly over the potbelly stove, and were ready for the morning’s big chore.
“Got gloves?” Tom asked as he opened the door. Don’t need ‘em, he was told.
The brothers arranged themselves around the bear after testing a few different positions. Tom chose the animal’s head’s end; the younger ones the rear legs.
“Okay, lift at the count of three.” Grunting followed, but the bear remained where it had collapsed the previous night.
“Again. One, two, three!” Grunting this time was followed by frustrated growling.
“Lifting makes no sense,” Frank said, a cigar clenched tight in his mouth as he spoke. “How about dragging it?”
Tom joined his brothers at the bottom of the bear. They crowded together and bent over to grab a hold where they could and pulled in unison. If they had been successful, which they weren’t, they would only have moved the dead animal a foot or two toward the outhouse.
“Damn. The three of us got to weigh as much as Smokey here,” said Frank, removing his Boston Red Sox cap to scratch his balding head.
They stood silently, surveying the stubborn obstacle at their feet.
“Chop it up and move it in pieces?” Bug suggested.
“Might have to do that. But what a damn mess it’ll be. The blood and guts will attract every critter in the woods.”
It was not in the nature of these brothers to give up easily. Bug’s older siblings had made it through the war, and not all had. They tried three more times to drag the bear. It didn’t much matter now if they cleared the path to the outhouse. It only mattered that they succeeded, and that the bear failed.
What Bug saw, as if he were a loon circling overhead—impossible, because everyone knows loons only make circles in water—were three brothers no longer young. Bug was halfway through his life and his brothers were closer to their end. Sure, the bear was heavy, having bulked up for the winter; but the brothers were overweight, too, and none of it was muscle. Bug could not recall them not finishing a task they had started, and this morning he saw their approaching mortality.
Tom leaned against the camp’s shingled wall. “Frank, our boys can take care of this bear. Randy and Billie.”
“You going to drive out and get ‘em? Who knows what they’re up to today.”
“When is Florence going to bring us another pie?’
Frank chewed on the end of his cigar. “Dunno. I got a second one in the truck,”
Bug was the loon again. The brothers stood at a measured, respectful distance from the bear, and from his airborne viewpoint, the loon could see the layout of one dead creature and three living men inexorably inching toward death themselves. Not many more hunting trips in the future, unless his nephews and own sons joined in, and then it would be different. These hunting trips weren’t for the meat, or even the sport of it; they were brothers, forged in the same cauldron of the early, mid- and now later twentieth-century, reunited once a year to sip whiskey over wide slices of pie and remember, even if they did not say so aloud, memories of their youth—one neither unique nor special, but theirs and no one else’s. Their father was gone, and their children raised in a different time, but they were here now, and not for forever.
As it turned out, Frank went first. His daughter found him dead inside the trailer he lived his last years after Florence predeceased him. Empty liquor bottles lay on the floor beside him. Tom died in Eastern Main, a hospital his construction firm built, hallucinating that he was back in Burma with the Army Corps of Engineers building bridges for a world still at war. Bug died in assisted living, a modern term he never would have used himself. At the end, he knew neither who his children were, nor himself. All were buried by their offspring, two not far from each other in a rural Maine graveyard, Bug in suburban Connecticut next to Liz. Tom’s widow, Maureen, may still be alive, but the Hedford cousins don’t talk much to each other these days.
*
Learn more about John on the Contributors’ page.
John’s lastest novel, First Consonants, was published in 2022 by Jaded Ibris Press and is available here.
(Photo: David/flickr.com/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Introducing the 2026 Best in Rural Writing print anthology.
This carefully curated collection brings together outstanding essays and short stories that delve into the landscapes, lives, and voices of rural spaces around the world.
Available this November.
- Bug by John Whittier Treat - October 30, 2025