Brian's Return (Hatchet, #4)

by Gary Paulsen

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).