Hatchet (Hatchet, #1)

by Gary Paulsen

rivers. Now Brian sat, looking out the window with the roar thundering through his ears, and tried to catalog what had led up to his taking this flight. The thinking started. Always it started with a single word. Divorce. It was an ugly word, he thought. A tearing, ugly word that meant fights and yelling, lawyers—God, he thought, how he hated lawyers who sat with their comfortable smiles and tried to explain to him in legal terms how all that he lived in was coming apart—and the breaking and shattering of all the solid things. His home, his life—all the solid things. Divorce. A breaking word, an ugly breaking word.

And a watch. He had a digital watch still on his wrist but it was broken from the crash—the little screen blank—and he took it off and almost threw it away but stopped the hand motion and lay the watch on the grass with the rest of it. There. That was it. No, wait. One other thing. Those were all the things he had, but he also had himself. Perpich used to drum that into them—“You are your most valuable asset. Don’t forget that. You are the best thing you have.”

“I’m hungry.” He said it aloud. In normal tones at first, then louder and louder until he was yelling it. “I’m hungry, I’m hungry, I’m hungry.” When he stopped there was a sudden silence, not just from him but the clicks and blurps and bird sounds of the forest as well. The noise of his voice had startled everything and it was quiet. He looked around, listened with his mouth open, and realized that in all his life he had never heard silence before. Complete silence. There had always been some sound, some kind of sound.

If the bear had wanted you, his brain said, he would have taken you. It is something to understand, he thought, not something to run away from. The bear was eating berries. Not people. The bear made no move to hurt you, to threaten you. It stood to see you better, study you, then went on its way eating berries. It was a big bear, but it did not want you, did not want to cause you harm, and that is the thing to understand here.

So fast, he thought. So fast things change. When he’d gone to sleep he had satisfaction and in just a moment it was all different.

I have a friend, he thought—I have a friend now. A hungry friend, but a good one. I have a friend named fire.

Small mistakes could turn into disasters, funny little mistakes could snowball so that while you were still smiling at the humor you could find yourself looking at death.

The days had folded one into another and mixed so that after two or three weeks he only knew time had passed in days because he made a mark for each day in stone near the door to his shelter. Real time he measured in events. A day was nothing, not a thing to remember—it was just sun coming up, sun going down, some light in the middle. But events—events were burned into his memory and so he used them to remember time, to know and to remember what had happened, to keep a mental journal.

“I heard your emergency transmitter—then I saw the plane when I came over . . .” He trailed off, cocked his head, studying Brian. “Damn. You’re him, aren’t you? You’re that kid? They quit looking, a month, no, almost two months ago. You’re him, aren’t you? You’re that kid . . .” Brian was standing now, but still silent, still holding the drink. His tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of his mouth and his throat didn’t work right. He looked at the pilot, and the plane, and down at himself—dirty and ragged, burned and lean and tough—and he coughed to clear his throat. “My name is Brian Robeson,” he said. Then he saw that his stew was done, the peach whip almost done, and he waved to it with his hand. “Would you like something to eat?”