Excerpt from The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Whispering. Two boys, perhaps three. Then, "Buuu-gler. Oh, Buuug-ler. We know you're out there. Should've stayed in your tent, Bugler ..."

He holds his breath, dares not move so much as a centimeter. "Tell us, Bugler. Do you know the way back to your tent?"

The beats in Nelson's chest intensify, even as his heart sinks. It is the strangest, saddest feeling. He imagines it is what a gambler must feel when the cards he has bet on don't stack up. When he realizes they've failed him.

"Because, Bugler. We do know the way. And, well, wouldn't it be a tragedy if poor Bugler's bugle were buggered before daybreak. Boo-hoo." And now the woods erupt with snide laughter and sudden movement. For they are flying away from him. He can see their vanishing shoulders glowing white-blue with the moonlight filtered down through the leaves above, like epaulettes.

He rises to take chase.

This time, though, the woods seem to conspire against him. Every tree reaches out a sharp set of branches to scratch at his face. Each half-rotten log seems to roll toward his shins and knees and toes. The forest floor is now littered with dozens of glacial erratics: boulders and rocks, some as big as automobiles, looming up and out of the dark forest floor to impede his progress.

They would destroy his horn! His grandfather's horn! The only redeeming memento of the man!

Now he is out of breath, bleeding, sweating, and desperately afraid of his bugle being stolen or vandalized. Ahead of him, the boys seem to be opening a distance. Tears begin to craze down his face, but when he wipes at his cheeks, the backs of his hands brush no eyeglasses, no metal frames, nothing but the wet, raw skin of his hot, hot face. Stopping short now, he blinks out at the indistinct world, terrified, and sadder even than he'd been a moment before. His eyeglasses are lost then, too.

I want to go home, is all he can think; and: I want my mom.

He stops and sits down. There is no urgency now. They will beat him to camp, slink into his tent, find the bugle, and by the time he arrives, he will be lucky to ever touch the instrument again. He imagines them throwing it into the lake, or worse yet, taunting him with it, hanging it from a tree so that he's publicly humiliated into retrieving it. His grandfather's bugle, stolen off some dead soldier on a bloody battlefield and taken all the way home from Europe aboard a steamship in 1917. All the horrific nightmares it has already survived—mustard gas, trench warfare, cavalry versus machine guns—before being brought back across the ocean, and clear across America, all the way to Wisconsin and somehow not destroyed by Nelson's father or his aunts or uncles. Only to be presented to Nelson, who has now managed to lose it in this disgraceful fashion, stupidly leaving his tent in the dead of night to chase rule breakers through the forest. What was it he even hoped to achieve—or, more shamefully yet, to observe?

He sits there, swatting the hundreds of mosquitos that have by now descended upon him, and thinks of Wilbur, the old Scoutmaster who all but predicted this evening's happenings, told Nelson what to expect and why. I have to be smarter, I have to be smarter than them. I can't fight all of them at once. Finally, resigned to whatever it is he's going to find he stands, and begins walking slowly in the direction he believes the camp might be.

From The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler. Copyright 2017 Nickolas Butler. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.