Mastering the wilderness with a blade. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.

Spoilers spoilers spoilers, be forewarned.

Can you survive in the wilderness by yourself with a simple hatchet? I don’t think I can. But it is an engaging premise and one that Paulsen speculated in its possibility, even for a teenage boy who has limited knowledge of camping and mother nature, a city boy who doesn’t really know the difference between an orangutan and a gorilla. But for a young adult book, it is mature in its prose and doesn’t treat the readers like children with hormones flying off the walls.

Pilot farts, plane crashes

Brian is stuck on a one-way flight to the Canadian wilderness, though he doesn’t know it yet. He’s alone with the pilot, who’s been having a lot of gas stinking up the plane like it’s Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood dungeon. And perhaps becaus of this farting he might have given himself a heart attack. Lucky for us, our young protagonist in Brian has a stronger constitution when it comes to inhaling bad odours. The trouble is, as the pilot was incapacitated from his fart-induced heart attack, he needs to figure out how to fly a small plane.

Somehow, he managed to crash the plane into a lake and finished up with minor bumps and bruises. Though he had lost all his possessions in the lake, the hatchet that his mother gave him prior to the flight is still hanging on to his belt. What follows is a tale of survival where a simple city boy must figure out how to create shelter, gather and hunt for food, battling aggressive animals and reflect on his life enough that he doesn’t kill himself.

Cast Away, if it was in the Canadian wilderness

Perhaps it is unfair to compare the book with Robert Zemeckis’ classic 2000 movie, which because of having read this book, I had to rewatch straight after in Netflix. But it is generally a survivor story with the divorced parent motif thrown in as a distraction. Though it might add a little colour to Brian as a character, I don’t think that it is necessarily relevant to the story.

We know about Brian enough to know that he had not had scout training and that he needs to figure out everything from scratch. Brian could be a gay drag queen with three bad mortgages and this back story won’t even matter. The meat of the story is not in Brian’s sad as fuck family background and keeping THE SECRET IN CAPITAL LETTERS, but in his trial and error of finding out what works in the bush, and how he can improve his stay as the only human resident of the nameless lake so that he can live the next day.

Paulsen, who’s not unfamiliar with the wilderness, had lived what his main character had gone through as a mountain man himself (at least he says in the back of the book). He even managed to start a fire with the sparks from a hatchet in his backyard. Perhaps the only thing that he didn’t go through was being a crash victim of a small plane. And if he did that as an author for research purposes to make the story more authentic, he might fast become my top 5 young adult author of all time. Because I don’t even know how you can crash into a lake and not die from impact or drown from the water pressure.

But maybe I’m nitpicking because that’s what I like to do. I appreciated the story of a young man who somehow, managed to survive. The story follows the logic of survival, and perhaps after having read Hatchet, it will give me the confidence to survive in the wilderness on my own with a hatchet hanging by my belt loop. Or not. I probably need my coffee and won’t survive a day without it.

What I didn’t know after having looked up the author was that he had written 200 books, primarily for children and young adults. He had also written a couple of books speculating what would have happened if Brian had never gotten saved. Would Brian survive the winter? And there are other books concerning Brian which I didn’t look up because I’m off my lunch hour and really need to go back to work and write my test scenarios, and also because I feel more for Chuck Noland from Cast Away and am more curious about what happened to him (Did he go back to miss angel wings and her adorable dog???) than I do about Brian and his divorced family. I’m sure that this question would have been addressed in the sequels, which I’m likely never going to read.