This story was originally published in December 2022.

This fall, Galusha was confronted with a heart-wrenching task. He would take Cooke into the woods, one last time, in search of a big buck.

The difference was that this time they would not be walking the tote roads and trails together. Instead, Galusha would be carrying Cooke’s cremains in his backpack.

Cooke died on Sept. 5 at age 61 after a long struggle with renal failure. Galusha said after 40 years of dialysis or living with a transplanted kidney, Cooke opted to cease treatment and enter hospice care when his third transplant failed.

Galusha couldn’t let it end like that. In spite of Cooke’s reluctance to have his old friend see him in such poor health, he went to visit him.

But as Cooke faced his own mortality, he asked one favor of Galusha.

“He said, ‘Promise me one thing, could you please, just one time, take me in to Upper Dam to go fishing before you dump my ashes?’” Galusha said.

The dam separates Mooselookmeguntic (Cupsuptic) Lake and Richardson Lake north of Rangeley. It was a favorite spot of theirs, one Cooke introduced to Galusha, who grew up in New York.

“He really loved the wilderness and Rangeley,” Galusha said of Cooke, who was a Vermont native.

Galusha immediately said yes but, knowing how much Cooke also enjoyed hunting, he didn’t feel as though the fishing trip was enough to adequately honor his friend.

“I said, I’m going to take you for the whole deer season, every time I go,” Galusha said. “He looked at me and started crying and said, ‘That would be so awesome.’

“It was hard. We cried and hugged each other,” he said.

When Galusha went deer hunting near his home in Rangeley during the third week of November — a week the two buddies often spent together over the years — he tried his best to make it like old times.

Galusha spared no effort. He carried the cardboard urn containing Cooke’s cremains inside a camouflage can, which was wrapped with a photo showing Cooke posing with a nice buck he had harvested many years earlier.

He also packed Cooke’s blaze orange hat and vest, along with his grunt tube, compass, doe bleat can, deer scents and a set of rattling antlers.

Galusha chronicled the events of each hunting day by posting to Cooke’s Facebook page, complete with observations, recollections and photos.

Lots of deer were seen and there was one encounter with a buck, but after missing initially, Galusha refused to take a bad shot as the deer was partially obscured by undergrowth.

“I just did what Doug would have done. He’s not going to shoot and I wasn’t going to shoot,” Galusha said.

He spoke reverently about Cooke’s resilience through the years in the face of his constant battle with health problems, which included not only kidney failure, dialysis and transplants, but four hip replacements and, eventually, a heart attack.

The arrival of muzzleloader season provided one more week to hunt. On Friday, Dec. 2, Galusha walked more than 3 miles along a gated road to an area where he had seen deer a week earlier.

That got him off the beaten track, away from other potential hunters, something Cooke would have appreciated.

“He wasn’t afraid to go do stuff,” Galusha said. “It might take us a little bit longer, but he didn’t care.”

Galusha, who still often refers to Cooke in the present tense, said he vocalized some of his reflections while in the woods. He saw eagles, which he thought might be Cooke keeping an eye on him.

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“I talked to him a lot,” Galusha said, who also enjoyed telling the handful of hunters he encountered that he was not out alone, rather with his friend.

He then explained the story of his promise to Cooke and reverently removed the urn from his pack to show them.

When Galusha finally saw the buck, it wasn’t quite close enough. He uses one of Cooke’s favorite tactics to coax the deer closer.

Galusha tried the grunt tube, and then the doe bleat can, but the deer didn’t seem to hear it. Then, he blew harder on the grunt tube and finally got the buck’s attention.

“I irked one right in, that’s what Doug would say,” said Galusha, recalling Cooke’s affection for using the alternating calls.

The spikehorn turned and walked directly at Galusha, who shot it.

“I cried,” he said of the moment, recalling that Cooke had been there when he shot his first antlered deer, also a spikehorn.

During the long drag back to his truck, Galusha had plenty of time to think about how much Cooke would have enjoyed the hunt — and watching him make the drag.

At one point, a crew of loggers had approached.

“I was pointing to the sky saying, ‘We got it done,’ shaking my hand,” Galusha said. “A guy came up behind me and said, ‘You all set?’ and I’m like, yup.”

Cooke and Galusha had lived together for 10 years at one point, but they also had gone long periods without talking with each other. Even so, whenever they were reunited it was as if they had never been apart.

The last few visits were difficult. Cooke’s health was failing, but Galusha just wanted to be there for his buddy.

“It was emotional,” said Galusha, who was present when Cooke died. “I held his hand to his last breath.”

Next spring, hopefully when the fish are biting and the bugs aren’t, Galusha will grant Cooke — who he described as a fabulous fisherman — his final wish by taking him fishing at Upper Dam, just like they used to do.

“I’m thinking maybe around his birthday [July 19]. It might be sooner, depending on how buggy it is,” said Galusha, who expects to make more than one excursion with Cooke.

Galusha said he will know when it’s time to say goodbye.

“I really don’t want to let him go, but I promised him I would, so I will,” he said.

ORONO, Maine (WABI) – On Saturday Maine Football hosted their bitter rivals the UNH Wildcats for their 112th all-time matchup with the coveted Brice-Cowell Musket on the line.

The Black Bears were the first team to make their mark on the scoreboard as Joey Bryson converted a 39-yard field goal with 3:56 left to play in the first quarter.

Maine would score again just a few minutes later as quarterback Carter Peevy connected with Montigo Moss for a spectacular one-handed touchdown.

After the Black Bears failed to score on a two-point conversion Maine held onto a 9-0 lead.

Maine’s ‘Black Hole’ defense was able to keep UNH off the board for nearly all of the first half.

But with 11 seconds to go before halftime the Wildcats scored their first touchdown of the game.

UNH would score their second touchdown on their first play from scrimmage in the second half giving them a 14-9 advantage.

That score would end up being the decisive one.

The Wildcats were able to shut out Maine the rest of the game en route to a 27-9 victory.

Saturday’s loss marks the third consecutive season that the Black Bears have lost in the Battle for the Brice-Cowell Musket.

Maine’s season has now come to an end as the Black Bears finish their season with a 5-7 record.

Copyright 2024 WABI. All rights reserved.

But where some outreach workers see peril, Dion sees a positive.

“I’m pretty proud of it,” he said of the city’s response, including opening a new, 258-bed shelter, which city officials said had absorbed many of the homeless evicted from the camps. “Some of the nonprofit world wanted a perfect answer, but you can’t wait for perfect.”

Crackdowns against homeless encampments have gained momentum in New England, after the Supreme Court ruled in June that communities can enforce bans on sleeping on public property. This month, the Brockton and Lowell city councils banned unauthorized camping on public property, joining Boston, Fall River, and Salem with some form of prohibition.

In Portland, the parks are now cleaner, but the underlying problems of homelessness remain, social workers said.

“The research is pretty clear that sweeps don’t work. We’re not supportive of the encampments, either; they’re awful places,” said Mark Swann, executive director of Preble Street. “But poverty is complex, and solutions to poverty and homelessness are complex, and people like the black and white.”

After the evictions, some of the homeless found shelter and a broad range of care at the $25 million homeless services center, which opened in March 2023 on the outskirts of the city, about 5 miles from downtown. About 15 to 20 beds are available each day, city officials said, but a far greater number of homeless are sleeping downtown and elsewhere.

The 53,000-square-foot complex contains a health clinic, dental services, storage lockers, mental health counseling, and meeting rooms for caseworkers, as well as three meals a day, laundry facilities, and shuttles that take clients to and from downtown, where other social-service providers are located.

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“This place saved my life,” said Michael Smith, 33, an Army veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, who had been sleeping next to a heating vent outside City Hall before he moved to the shelter.

Clients can leave whenever they choose, but many remain for days or weeks while matches with hard-to-find housing are sought for them. No identification is required, and people are accepted even if under the influence, but substance use is not tolerated on site.

“We’ll serve 1,300 to 1,400 unduplicated individuals in a year,” said Aaron Geyer, the city’s director of social services. “I’m incredibly proud of the space we have. It had been a long time coming.”

City spokesperson Jessica Grondin said the number of homeless on the streets is smaller than the number evicted from the camps.

“Most have gone to the shelter,” Grondin said. “We will have a warming shelter in place this winter when the temperatures get to a certain level,” she added, and “outreach workers will encourage these folks to go there for the night.”

The city’s previous shelter, located downtown, had used beds and floor mats, some placed about 12 to 16 inches apart, to accommodate 154 people. In addition to the new facility, Portland operates a family shelter with 146 beds, and a space with 179 beds used by asylum seekers.

David George Delancey, 62, a former truck driver, has been living at Portland’s upgraded shelter for more than a year. “This is probably the best place to be if you want to be safe,” he said.

Delancey is still looking for housing, which Swann, of Preble Street, said is increasingly unaffordable and has contributed to the dramatic escalation of Portland’s homelessness.

“There was a time not that long ago, about seven years ago, when it was extremely rare in Greater Portland to see somebody sleeping outside,” Swann said. “There were eight or nine nonprofits running shelters along with the city at that time, and a really robust planning mechanism. That stopped on a dime.”

Under former governor Paul LePage, the state cut its reimbursement rate for general-assistance funding, which communities can use for shelter costs, to 70 percent from 90 percent, Swann said. For Portland, a tourist destination with a lively food and arts scene, that decrease squeezed its ability to serve the homeless, he added.

“People do not disappear when you do not shelter them, and almost overnight dozens and dozens of people could not find a safe place to sleep with a roof over their heads,” Swann said.

Other reasons for the spike included the mass social disruptions caused by COVID, a shortage of housing vouchers, and a steep rise in Portland’s cost of living. The city’s real-estate prices, including rents, have soared along with an increase in gentrification.

A point-in-time survey in January 2023 by MaineHousing, an independent state agency, found 4,258 people were homeless in Maine, a nearly fourfold increase over the 1,097 who were recorded in 2021.

“The other big challenge is that Maine has a serious opioid problem, one of the highest per-capita rates in the nation,” said Andew Bove, vice president of social work at Preble Street, which has 108 beds at three shelters in the city. “Many of the people we see sleeping out, a high percentage, have opioid-use disorder.”

Opioid fatalities have declined in Portland this year, to 14 deaths through October compared with 39 through October 2023, according to police statistics. But nonfatal overdoses have increased, to 459 from 399 over the same period.

Dion said opioid use in the camps, and its related safety concerns, were important drivers of the decision to raze them.

“There was a lot of violence and exploitation directed against women in that population,” as well as theft in abutting neighborhoods, said Dion, who was elected to the City Council in 2020. “It went from being incidental to dominating the landscape of the city. At City Hall, it sucked the oxygen from every other issue.”

On the streets, the homeless continue to congregate during the day, primarily in the Bayside neighborhood, which is home to several social service providers.

Matt Brown, who founded an outreach group called Hope Squad, said it’s painfully apparent that more needs to be done, especially with winter approaching.

“I see people here, and I can almost see putting them in a [body] bag,” said Brown, a former federal parole officer, as he walked through Bayside recently.

“The uncertainty of what’s going to happen in the next few months is really scary,” he added. “Your garden-variety citizen doesn’t know exactly what’s going on.”

Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at brian.macquarrie@globe.com.