Lugging a heavy backpack, Rick Simon took the last few steps to reach the crest of the hill he and his brother had been climbing for the last hour or so and scanned the area below—and he cussed under his breath.

There was nothing but the wilderness as far was his eyes could see.

"Oh, great! This is just great! Where's the lodge we're supposed to be at, Rick?" A.J. asked sarcastically catching up with his brother. He had been bitterly complaining about the whole thing all the way up the hill.

"Hey, put a cork in it! I can't focus when you're whining." Rick snapped irritably like his dog, Marlowe, would at a pesky fly.

"Focus? To do what? Meander aimlessly in the middle of nowhere, huh? It may be highly entertaining for you, but this is not my idea of dream vacation!" A.J. was nowhere near done complaining. "This is it—this is absolutely the last time I let you talk me into taking a vacation together."

"I enjoy being lost as much as you do, all right? But it's not entirely my fault—it was just a string of bad luck," said Rick in his own defense.

"Bad luck? Oh no, no, no. Getting hit by lightning is bad luck, or, getting involved in a train wreck, or, having an older brother like you, which is more or less the combination of a lightning strike and a train wreck, but you can't blame the situation we're in solely on bad luck. We're hopelessly lost because of your unpreparedness: you didn't bring the area map, you refused to ask for directions at the last gas station where you forgot to fill the gas can…"

And so A.J.'s nagging went on as the sun started to dip below the horizon. Although Rick would never say it aloud, this was not his idea of dream vacation either. What he had been envisioning was a simple but comfortable room at the lodge, along with long hikes and fishing trips to the pristine rivers and lakes in the lush forest.

Instead, he was staring at a strong likelihood of spending a night in the unfamiliar woods without a tent and a sleeping bag while trying to tune out his cranky brother's bellyache. When his Power Wagon had run out of gas, the brothers had hiked up the hill to have a better view of the area, and they had had enough sense to bring their backpacks with provisions. But it was getting dark, and it was unwise to try to go back to the truck if you didn't want to get lost on the way back.

Resigned, Rick sighed and took a quick look around to find a suitable spot to camp out. Just when he was thinking about gathering dry leaves to build a makeshift bed, he caught something in his peripheral vision.

"A.J.?" He cut off his brother's whining in midstream. "Looks like there's a cabin over there."

"Really? Where?" A.J. perked up a little bit with a prospect of spending a night indoors. He squinted in the diminishing daylight to see what was beyond a copse of trees Rick was pointing at. "That doesn't look like much."

"I'd say any shelter is better than sleeping without a tent in the forest where bears and cougars and coyotes are known to roam."

A.J. couldn't argue with that, so they forged ahead, hacking away the tangled mess of thickets and brambles to make a shortcut to the cabin. By the time they got to the clearing where the cabin stood, the darkness had fallen. They had literally worked up a sweat making a new trail to get there. With the temperature rapidly falling, the night breeze on the mountain was a little too cool for their liking, making them shiver.

The cabin was not much more than a lean-to and had not been maintained well, but that did not stop Rick from reaching for the door handle eagerly.

"Wait a minute." A.J. put his hand on his arm. "Shouldn't we knock first?"

"You gotta be kidding," Rick was incredulous. "It's obviously abandoned. And there's no light or sound coming from inside."

Nevertheless, he knocked on the door so that A.J. would have one less thing to complain about. As expected, no one answered the door.

"There, happy? Can I go in now?"

Before A.J. could answer, Rick walked in with a flashlight on. The interior was just as poor in condition as the exterior of the structure. One of the two rooms had a plain table—apparently hand-built—and a couple of chairs. The other served as a bedroom with a cot and a nightstand.

A.J. made a beeline for the cot, which was too small to sleep two adults comfortably, and sat down on it with a sigh of relief, setting his backpack down on the floor. Till then, Rick had been willing to let his brother sleep on the cot to make up for bungling their vacation plan, but seeing him claim it like it was his birthright got on his nerves.

"Hey, who said you could have the bed?"

A.J.'s head snapped up. He had been planning to suggest they take turns to sleep on it although he had been hoping Rick would offer it to him as a form of apology for the inconvenience—to put it mildly—he had caused.

"Then what do you suggest we do to settle this matter?" His tone was that of a dare, which made his sibling even more irked.

"Coin toss." Rick stared him down as if to challenge him.

"Fine!" A.J. scooted off the cot and stood up, his arms crossed over his chest. "You toss, I call."

"Fine!"

The brothers glared at each other for a few seconds.

Rick reached into his pants pocket to fish out a coin. After a brief moment, he asked awkwardly, "Got a quarter with ya?"

A.J. threw him his I-can't-believe-what-I'm-hearing look but produced a quarter from his coin pocket and tossed it to him. "Here, keep it."

Rick caught and flipped it without another word. When he slapped the coin on the back of his left hand, A.J. immediately called, "Heads."

Rick lifted his right hand slightly so that only he could take a peek and grinned.

"You lose." He uncovered his hand to show which side the quarter lay on. "You sure you don't wanna get your quarter back?" He rubbed it in.

A.J. was usually a gracious loser, but the coin flip and its outcome was the last straw after spending a day where everything that could go wrong had gone disastrous. He picked up his backpack and stormed out of the bedroom.

After that, they hardly spoke. They had a handful of dried food, Gatorade with a chaser of water in their separate rooms before turning in.

Rick was no longer mad at A.J.; he was keenly aware it was his fault that they were lost. He did not care for his brother's constant nagging, but he hated a silent treatment even more. He quietly watched A.J. get ready for bedding down by rolling up an extra T-shirt for a pillow and wearing a warm jacket to ward off a chill in the air.

"Good night, A.J."

When his clumsy attempt to offer an olive branch was met with an unintelligible mumble, festering resentment reared its ugly head.

If you keep acting like a spoiled brat, you deserve to sleep on the floor all night.

Rick flopped down on the cot with a jacket over his body, getting angry again with A.J. and himself.