Brian's Return (Hatchet, #4)

by Gary Paulsen

In the past two years, except for the time with Derek on the river, in a kind of lonely agony he had tried to find things to read or watch that brought the woods to him.

The one he described for Caleb was in the winter.

“What about that Cree family who rescued you? The trappers?”

He had instead studied the true winners, the people in history who had survived in the wild because they had no other choice—the primitive Native Americans of the past, as well as Inuit, Cree and even the peoples of the U.S. Southwest, though the terrain in that region was radically different from these north woods. For them it wasn’t a game but their lives; what Brian knew now as primitive living had in fact been modern for them.

Three dead rabbits. As he held an arrow to the heat he let his mind play with the numbers. Three dead rabbits in an hour. He could probably only hear them scream from a couple of hundred yards—say a quarter of a square mile around him. Which meant that perhaps six rabbits an hour were killed in every square mile of wilderness at night and yet there were still hundreds, thousands of rabbits running loose, so many that in winter they left small highways packed so hard they would hold a human up on the snow. He shook his head. Wasted thought. There were rabbits. They were good to eat. He had eaten many of them. He would eat many more. It was enough.

Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name, Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. Here a strange thing happened to Brian. Whenever he’d heard this part before—on television, in school—he’d thought she was looking for Romeo, wondering where he was, calling for him. But something brought the words, the meaning, to him as he stood there in the afternoon sun, reading it aloud out onto the lake, and he knew that was wrong, knew that she was instead calling on Romeo, asking him why he was a member of the wrong family, the Montagues, and if only he weren’t … And a few lines later he read Juliet saying: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet.

Because he knew he could kill the bear, knew he would kill the bear, he didn’t have to kill. He was even with the bear.

This is the final book about Brian, though someday I may do a nonfiction book about those parts of my life that were like Brian’s.

I started hunting and trapping and fishing in the north woods of Minnesota when I was about eleven. Due to the difficult nature of my childhood I could not be home and spent much of the time—to the detriment of my grades—in the woods with either an old lemonwood bow and half a dozen homemade arrows or a worn old single-shot Remington .22 rifle that fired only half the time and never ejected right (I had to dig the expended cartridge case out with the tip of a pocketknife). Virtually all that happens to Brian in these books has happened to me at some point or other in my life. I have been in two forced landings in light planes, though not nearly as severe as the crash Brian suffers in Hatchet (although that crash is based on a true incident). I have hunted large and small game extensively with a straight bow, have been attacked by moose several times, have had a bear “play” with me as the bear in this book does with Brian (it is a humbling experience to feel like prey), have had a doe jump into my canoe to get away from flies, have eaten what Brian eats, made fires and cooked the way he cooks, worked and slept beneath a canoe the way he does in this book, lived in lean-tos and holes in the ground and found and believe in my “medicine” (similar to Billy’s, mine is a crow).

the quality of the food I ate then far surpasses anything I can buy from the store now, either vegetable or animal (though I am now a vegetarian) and it was perhaps the healthiest time of my life.

The sea saved me, and it continues to save me. I have always loved it, and at times in my life I had small boats and sailed, not on any long trips, just to local areas in California. But I had moved away from the coast and about the time it became evident that the hut in the New Mexico mountains was still too “tame” (if that is the right word) I found the sea again, right where it has always been, bought an old thirty-eight-foot sailboat, which I spent two years restoring, and went out into what is possibly the only big wilderness left—the Pacific Ocean. I am there now. It is the winter of 1997–98 and El Niño has made it impossible for me to get across the Pacific until spring and so I sit in San Diego, repairing bits on the boat that seem to break simply because they are on a boat.

And so I am writing this on a laptop while seagulls fight over garbage up in the Dumpster at the top of the public docks. There is a soft rain coming down— I can hear it pattering on the skylight hatch over my head—and I have Mozart on the tape player while I wait. Not long. Just until the wind changes. And then I will go again—always, as Brian must always go. Gary Paulsen On the sloop Felicity San Diego Bay, February 1998