Hatchet is a 1987 Newbery-award winning novel by Gary Paulsen about a thirteen-year-old boy who survives in the Canadian wilderness for fifty-four days after a plane crash with little more than a hatchet and a sense of desperation. It has sold over two million copies and is beloved by an entire generation.
First of all, no, you wouldn’t. You’re the type of person who takes survival quizzes while you’re at work, carefully minimizing the screen whenever someone walks behind your desk. You have never missed a meal in your adult life; if you ever did you would become unbearable within a half an hour. You can’t run a mile and yet some part of you is convinced you’d make it just fine on The Walking Dead, which isn’t even a real thing that could ever happen to you.
On a puddle-jumper en route to the oil fields of Northern Canada, your bush pilot suffers a sudden, fatal heart attack. He slumps over the controls, sending the plane into a nosedive. You see a clearing up ahead. What do you do?
You can barely keep yourself composed on a passenger plane. Your great-grandparents single-handedly ran ranches in West Texas for decades, repairing fences and driving livestock through rough weather and praying for rain and you work in an office and have no real problems and go to your doctor every time you have to fly to ask for muscle relaxants. The reason you cannot relax by yourself is because you do not ever actually work. You live in a state of constant relaxation and have mistaken that for depression.
After constructing a minimal shelter and finding some berries, you are attacked by a porcupine. There are no medical supplies for hundreds of miles. How do you nurse yourself back to health?
You don’t. You would die. You would die of a handful of porcupine quills, which have almost certainly already started developing a secondary infection. Once when you were twelve, you broke your ankle falling down a stairwell while horsing around with your friends after church, and you lay there at the bottom of the stairwell for half an hour until someone found you. You were in the middle of a building full of people and had three perfectly serviceable limbs with which to haul yourself up the railing, but you were so incapable of fending for yourself that you shut down entirely. A porcupine would kill you in an instant.
Also, you would have already lost the hatchet at this point.
Using your hatchet, you are able to fashion a crude bow and arrow that you use to hunt f–
No, you’re not.
One night a tornado sweeps through the area and destroys the crude shelter you have constructed for yourself. How and where do you rebuild?
You would not. You would give up. You forgot to bring socks on a camping trip when you were sixteen, and you borrowed socks from your friends until they wouldn’t lend you any more of your own stuff. You would halfheartedly fling a few sticks together, then try to feel sorry for yourself in a picturesque manner, in case anyone is watching and decides to take pity on you. No one is; no one does.
While you are hunting, a search and rescue plane flies overhead, then disappears over the horizon, despite your attempts to flag it down. What do you do?
You give up and die. You have never hunted anything in your life. You cannot even do a pushup. The emotional weight of such a disappointment would crush your spirit into the dust.
Your results: You would make it through 2 pages of Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet!
Tags: books, fitness, gary paulsen, hatchet, quizzes, survival
i think you’ll find i can do ten push ups
Do modified pushups count?
but can you lift a man above your head?
There is no need to lift a man above your head when you can use your feet to crush him into the earth.
i think you'll find i can do ten push ups
By whom other than my fifth grade teacher Mr. Pesutich is Hatchet beloved?
You can add my college roommate (who had an inexplicable love of wilderness survival stories) to this count.
ME (despite knowing that a. I would die within days and b. I hate camping). Love me some Gary Paulsen.
Me. We read Hatchet in fourth grade; it’s basically a nice way to tell Montana kids that we may have to swim into a plane that’s holding a dead pilot one day.
my ex girlfriend jamie
ME.
All teen survival stories were just the best thing when I was younger.
It was definitely solidly enjoyable as a Young. As an Old, I am content to allow that impression to be my only one.
My older son loves all the Paulsen books. He’s aged out of them now (he’s 14) but he loooooved them when he was younger.
Me! I loved it as a child and reread it as an adult. It holds up pretty well.
ME!
me omg me
although the part where he dives into the wreck and then discovers that fish have been eating that dead pilot’s face and that HE HAS BEEN EATING THOSE FISH is burned into my brain for all eternity.
The amount of times I have acted out the entire story of ‘Hatchet’ at parties and on car rides to bewildered friends and acquaintances unfamiliar with the work. The best part?
After finishing the re-enactment, explaining the premise for ‘The River’ to freshly blown minds.
(The premise is no one can believe a kid survived the first book so they fly him back up to show them how he did it and then the plane crashes AGAIN.)
Dude, yes, and they’re like “ASTRONAUTS MUST LEARN HOW TO DO THIS AND SOLDIERS” and I’m like….you know they have a perfectly good, rigorous course for that already, and it doesn’t rely on teaching techniques from 13-year-old boys, right?
I couldn’t remember if I made up the Astronaut part or not so I left it out. Thank you for confirming this insanity.
The plane doesn’t crash, the guy he’s supposed to be teaching gets struck by lightning, which also destroys their emergency beacon.
*I can’t remember anyone’s name ever but I remember shit like this from books I read over 20 years ago SMDH
I barely survived reading this in class in grade 5, no way I would last even 2 pages…
I DID read this book in middle school! (And hated it.)
Surely if a 13 year old boy, probably the least intelligent sex/age can do it, I can?
“And hated it.”
Yessss. Also My Side of the Mountain. Also any other boring book about a dude surviving in the wilderness. The Neolithic Revolution was intended to save us from experiencing the horrors of hunting and gathering, and I will not idly throw our ancestors’ gift aside by reading about how sucky hunting and gathering are.
It also always bugged that the dad (?) was is like, “oh, sure, you’re what, 12 now? Yeah, you can quit school and go live on your own on a mountain. Sure, eat squirrels and berries, one less mouth to feed.” I can’t remember if they even look for him?
So many small airplane nightmares after reading this book. So. Many.
What about My Side of the Mountain? Would I be able to tame a falcon?
My brother and I re-created that log fall trap for a deer and ended up nearly killing our little sister.
No.
You would probably forget to cut smoke vents in your tree and suffocate.
My metric is The Hunger Games. “I would die instantly in the hunger games,” I think to myself every time I crumble under perfectly luxurious circumstances, like just an hour ago when I took the dog on a 2-mile walk at 9:00 AM on a workday before it got hot out (87 today!!). It was humid and I had to carry her poop around and there were bugs and I forgot to brush my teeth do you know how disgusting I felt
help me
I’ve convinced myself I would hide in a tree by a lake eating berries until everyone else dies. But I’d probably fall and break my leg while trying to climb the tree.
Aren’t the berries poisonous?
Better to die quickly by your own hand then spend days evading capture by sadistic, knife-wielding frat boys.
I feel like The Hunger Games is WAY HARDER than real life, because like half the food has been modified to be poisonous and then like all the crazy genetically modified super predators and shit. Like, even The Hunger Games realistically would not have a winner like any year.
Toasties, I’ll take this opportunity to let you know I’d be a great asset to your apocalypse survival team. Reading Hatchet when I was kid really made me want to learn more about wilderness survival, and now, 20 years later, I am pleased to tell you I can:
– Fire a firearm with accuracy
– Actually use a hatchet
– Build a one-match fire in the rain
– Catch and gut a fish
– Skin and gut a wild turkey
– Shoot a bow and arrow with accuracy
– Build lean-to shelters
– Treat wounds with wilderness emergency skills
– Read the clouds and weather for impending doom
– Navigate by stars/map/compass
– Make jokes in the face of danger
I’d make it to page 37, at least. Add me to your team.
I read the headline and thought, “I would die immediately.” DO NOT ADD ME TO YOUR TEAM.
HELLO FRIEND! Can I hire you on for my post-apocalyptic commune? I have booze-making, plant foraging (in my current area and the area I’m from), food preservation, and mad cooking skills, and I’m figuring out desert/drought condition food gardening. All I gotta do is find someone with the fighting and hunting skills to hire with mead and beer.
As long as I get through that first bit at least.
Yes. I think if the apocalypse hits, I’m giving up sobriety anyway, so I’ll be your fighter/hunter for beer.
That’s so cool! Gotta admit, I find wilderness survival soooooper sexy (once upon a time when I was a member of my town’s wildlife club, I organized a women’s “Gun Night” up at the local gun range and we had, pardon the pun, a blast).
Also, I heard from a hunter that wild turkeys are absolutely crawling with fleas and/or lice and the meat is absolutely not worth it when faced with all the creepy crawlies (he was de-feathering it in the sink when his wife came along just in time to see hundreds of bugs deserting the carcass like so many rats fleeing a sinking ship. Needless to say, Thanksgiving was non-turkey that year.
That’s interesting! I’ve only ever hunted turkeys up in Montana, and since we sit so far north, our climate doesn’t actually allow for fleas to survive here. They have to be brought in on other animals from somewhere further south (this is according to my dogs’ veterinarian).
And with turkeys, I don’t even worry about de-feathering (plucking); just skin them, remove all the feathers at once.
Hey, we are almost neighbours! South eastern BC’er, here (right on the border). I’ve been to Whitefish and Bozeman for horse and sheepdog clinics and your State is beautiful!
Back to turkey talk: I’m not a hunter myself and most of the hunting dudes I know keep strictly to elk, deer or moose so maybe his turkey was an anomaly. Either way, ewwwwwwwww.
Hey! We are definitely neighbors – I’m a Northwest Montanan. Whitefish and Bozeman are great, and I find sheepdogs fascinating.
Somehow I doubt your friend’s turkey was an anomaly. Birds are so gross in general; I usually stick to hunting big game myself because it’s you get more meat. Turkeys are fun, but yeah, not usually worth the effort. I only hunt them when I’ve filled my antelope tags and have to wait for deer season to start and have nothing else to do while in Eastern Montana. But the meat isn’t terrible; it’s perfect to mix in with other dishes.
That’s why you should hunt grouse instead. They are small but easily prepared: step on the wings and pull on the feet and the feet come off with the skin, head, and entrails, leaving you two skinned grouse-breasts easily separated from the wings.
… that is… FASCINATING and i am also HORRIFIED
I am not nearly as expert as you, but I was the same way as a kid! I loved all the kid-survives-in-the-wilderness books. My parents had been really into backpacking and camping before they were burdened with wimpy children, so I had a whole collection of survival manuals and edible plant guides to read. I basically tried to eat half of our backyard and spent months perfecting a shelter made of twine and sticks. I even had a flint and steel, though I wasn’t allowed to practice using it, sadly.
Nowadays, I only apply that knowledge in storing a pocketknife in every bag I have (just in case!), and pointing at random plants and saying “you can eat that” to friends on hikes.
Yes to pocketknives in every bag! I also carry one on my person, usually clipped to the inside of my pants pocket. I also try to keep a lighter in most bags (I don’t smoke) for just in case!
And I’m by no means an expert. I just find this stuff fun; knowing I am prepared for something gives me great joy, and I’ve pursued that joy by learning as much as I can. It’s nerdy, but the love is real.
I have only accidentally lit myself on fire twice and both times I put myself out
One time I was trying to light a match off the back of my teeth, and the white phosphorous tip on the match ignited and landed on my tongue. So I have lit my mouth on fire before.
It’s OK, we understand, you’re among friends, no need to explain the drive to light matches with your face.
Hahahahaha, it was a terrible idea then, still seems like a terrible idea now.
One time I accidentally lit myself on fire, didn’t notice for about ten minutes, still didn’t realise when the people around me started screaming, and only caught on once a longsuffering nearby adult put me out. Do not add me to this team.
This is the survival standard to which I shall hold myself. This and this alone.
Aside from the handgun and turkey parts that is a list of my elementary schools fifth grade ‘survival’ curriculum.
I can also tell time by the position of the sun if I’m with in about 40 degrees of the equator and I know CPR.
…I can knit socks? That’s my contribution to survival.
BUT what about the 10 zillion Hatchet sequels? I think Brian eventually goes back to live in the woods because he can’t handle normal society or something?
But now that he’s back in civilization, Brian can’t find a way to make sense of ordinary daily life. He feels disconnected, more isolated than he did alone in the North. The only answer is to return to the woods, to “go back in,” for only in the wilderness can Brian discover his true path in life, and where he really belongs.
No, you know what the answer is? THERAPY. And plenty of it.
Yeah he tried that but it sort of lost its efficacy after he turned the therapist into a set of primitive but sturdy moccasins using only a pen and trial-and-error learning.
Deeply dissapointed that the sequels do not continue in the vein of The River, stranding Brian with increasingly absurd single tools.
Following his fourteenth consecutive plane crash, Brian finds himself stranded in the Canadian tundra and must find a way to survive, equipped only with a Sharper Image Stainless Steel Steam Cleaning Grill Brush. Can he erect a stable shelter, outlast the winter, and make the 50,000-mile trek back to civilization on two broken legs? Also there’s wolves this time.
But that’s only in one possible timeline. There is a Hatchet multiverse.
The Prime Timeline consists of most of The Hatchet, right up to the point where Brian activates an emergency beacon.
In Timeline Α, a fur trader picks up the signal and rescues Brian before winter sets in. The government later hires Brian to demonstrate his elite survival skills instead of a greenhorn psychologist, leading to the events of The River. Timeline A concludes with Brian’s triumphant return home.
But in Timeline B, Brian is not rescued before summer’s end. Can he endure…Brian’s Winter?
Of course he can–though not without cost. A friendly family of Cree Indians eventually rescues him, but the wilderness has had time to take root in his soul. Deciding that modern life is rubbish, Brian Returns to the wild for good in the book of almost, but not quite, the same name.
But then the friendly Cree family is murdered by a bear!!! The question of whether Brian will bring the grizzly to justice occupies Brian’s Hunt. In the end, Brian turns his back on the laws of men by executing the bear himself.
In Timeline Γ, Brian expiates that karmic debt by being reincarnated as a bear…a Chicago Bear! Brian’s Song examines his unlikely friendship with fellow running back Gale Sayers. Brian will need all the love Gayle can give if he’s to make it through the greatest survival test of all: late stage embryonal cell carcinoma.
Okay I had no idea that the two Hatchet timelines were REAL, but oh, they are.
This comment is a masterpiece.
but what happens in the darkest timeline???
I love that the sequel/s is all very ‘Royal Tenenbaums’ reasoning.
“Eli: Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is… maybe he didn’t.”
I read Brian’s Winter so many more times than The Hatchet. Maybe because my family actually owned a copy?
Ok but also you have to read Gary Paulsen’s Woodsong, which is about him running sled dogs, which I love for some reason.
(lays head down on desk in air conditioned office, sobs quietly as she realizes yes it’s all true i would just want the porcupine to kill me quickly)
I was already sobbing at that first paragraph and how scarily accurate it is to everything in my life. Particularly the meal thing.
Fortunately (Fortunately ???) I have a pretty serious allergy to bees and hornets, so as soon as I got stung by anything I would be pretty much gone.
I would be dead, yes, but I wouldn’t have to be humiliated by a porcupine, so I think that counts for something.
My favourite teen survival novel is called The Girl Who Owned a City.
All the adults die of some strange plague, kids basically go feral. Then one super special 12 year old organizes and turns a school into a fortress and does ridiculous shit like pour hot oil on the kids who try to invade her fortress.
In all these worlds I would be pretty damn dead.
I must read this. It sounds like a festival of misandry.
boiling children in oil how did I miss this when I was 14
I won’t swear that there’s boiling oil, but it sounds about right. My ten year old self thought it was pretty vicious.
I loved that book! I still frequently size up large institutional buildings for their potential as fortresses.
I suspect everyone who has read that book still does that.
I did this with all of my school buildings, over and over, through probably eleventh grade. It was my favorite daydream. Although usually it was a little more peaceful in that book and whatever dude I had a crush on just happened to be stuck in with me.
I now realize I was lucky not to be stuck anywhere with any of those dudes, but, you know, neither here nor there.
I do still do that. I currently work in a large hospital, and…. well, there are worse places.
This was one of the most fondly-remembered books of my youth, until I read that it was written as a way to introduce young adults to Objectivist philosophy. It’s YA though, so Lisa doesn’t have rape fantasies. She just talks a lot about property rights, IIRC.
There’s a reason I haven’t tried to reread it. I don’t want to lose any of my love for it.
There was a Star Trek episode with a similar plot. The crew arrives in a city where all the adults have died and mischievous, somewhat evil children are running the place. They have built their fortress/base of operations in a toy store.
Toy store? Impractical. Lisa would conquer them all.
THANK YOU I swear I have been trying to remember what this book was called from vague, not even half remembered plot points for YEARS
WAIT I LOVED THIS BOOK, and I had NO IDEA anyone else had read it, much less loved it as much as I did.
What a great fucking book.
HOLY SHIT I FORGOT ABOUT THIS BOOK.
Yeah, but the reason I can’t run a mile is that I’m a smoker, which means I would have a lighter on me (probably 3 of them, if I dug around in my purse), and a lighter is worth, like, 50 arrows, right?
Wait, no, I would die of nicotine-withdrawal-induced self-pity first
I’d like to think I’d make it for appropriately one week, ten days tops, but this is more like it:
“You have never missed a meal in your adult life; if you ever did you would become unbearable within a half an hour.”
Yeah, with that first stomach rumble all forms of common sense and decorum go right out the cedar branch lean-to window.
Me too, but in this scenario you are alone! No decorum necessary.
It’s generally considered pretty gauche to revert to cannibalism within your first 24 hours.
I want to million thumbs up this; there’s a Donner Party joke in here somewhere, but I probably ate it.
Actually, good news about porcupine quills: they produce their own antiseptic! That is so that porcupines don’t accidentally give each other blood sepsis when they are boning.
wait but I read that porcupine quills often result in infection! Does the antiseptic work on non-porcupines?
IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING, I would last for about a day before I got myself killed, confidently asserting some wilderness survival fact that I heard from Jack Palance on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not reruns I saw when I was fifteen.
This article I just found on a WEBSITE says that they rarely fester: http://www.nature.ca/notebooks/english/amporcu.ht….
But who knows.
Incidentally, I once saw a porcupine while I was camping. They are huge. I thought it was a small bear.
They are large. They wander around our forests gnawing on antlers. Badasses.
Another fun porcupine fact: they belong to the group of mammals that do actually have a penile bone, or baculum, so “boning” is a more than usually apt word choice here. (Unfortunately for me, I think that amount of nerdy trivia about animal reproductive systems one knows is likely inversely related to one’s probability of survival in the wilderness; I give myself 3 pages, max).
I don’t want to derail the conversation, but I have been trying for YEARS to track down a similar book which I read as a child and the title and author of which I have totally forgotten, and I figure a fellow Toastie might be able to help.
The book in question was set in California (I think?). There was a massive earthquake which resulted in a boy about 12 getting stuck navigating the wilderness and/or the post-apocalyptic urban landscape accompanied only by an old man and a chimp that knew sign language.
Does this ring any bells? Please someone say yes, this has been slowly gnawing away at me for about 15 years and my worst fear at this point is that the book never actually existed and is just some weird fever dream of mine that took on a life of its own.
YES THAT IS A REAL BOOK but dammit I can’t remember the title and now it will slowly drive me insaaaaaaane. *gnawing on fingernails* But YES! I remember that book!
My husband watches this silly show “Mountain Men” following ultra-survivalists guys who live miles away from civilization in the Dakotas or Alaska. There’s this one guy, a trapper, who is absolutely terrible at his job. Every single fucking time he goes out he gets stranded in the wilderness with a busted snowmobile and it’s nightfall and he’s about to freeze to death. I’m sure the only reason he hasn’t died yet is because the producers are probably right there with a trailer full of hot cocoa and take pity on him. I’m convinced that his wife is pouring sugar in the snowmobile’s gas tank. “Oh honey you’re back I was SO worried jesus fuck just die already what do i have to do“
Tell your husband to watch the documentary “Happy People” on Netflix. It’s by Werner Herzog, so you know it’s good. And it’s about Russian trappers who spend most of the year on their own in the woods with their dogs and they are so weird and delightful.
Man I watched that a couple times this year, just to get through the Chicago winter. Also my partner and I gone in the first wave of any adversity, easy. No illusions there.
I know someone who’s on one of those shows, and it’s hilarious how often the show manages to manufacture TERRIBLE DANGER out of some ordinary event that happens every day, like a snowmobile breaking down.
Toast Petition: Write to Survivorman. Ask him to please create an episode based on The Hatchet. (He may have already done this)
Dear God, I love Les Stroud. Did you know there are some NEW Survivorman episodes? AND he is convinced Bigfoot is real and did a two-part special about it?
Yes! The ones with his son are hilarious. You can tell he thinks Les is kind of lame.
I did not know he thinks that Bigfoot is real! But it makes me feel like there is a greater possibility that Bigfoot is indeed real, because who would know if not for Les Stroud?!
OMG, you MUST watch it. He has video evidence! VIDEO EVIDENCE I SAY!!!!
I love that his kid thinks he’s weird. It is the quintessential Daddish relationship.
Friend: What’s your zombie apocalypse plan?
Me: Dying quickly with the least amount of pain possible.
Let’s be real, the only thing I’d semi-survive maybe is an EMP blast (ala Jeremiah/ Revolution. I might be okay in a Jericho situation)
I’ve been unable to view the whole ‘zombie apocalypse preparation’ thing as a cutesy quirk or whatever ever since the dumbest least responsible guy I know started breathlessly describing all the guns he was buying to be ready for the zombie apocalypse.
I don’t get why anyone even wants to try to survive the zombie apocalypse. It’s never any fun, and it never ends. I’d give up immediately, as painlessly as possible. Maybe after drinking a bunch of milkshakes and having a bunch of sex.
just the happiest lil’ band of necrophiles in the world
I checked out of Hatchet on like page 4, but I am pretty sure I could dry and eat the hell out of some abalone jerky and tame a wild dog like Karana did in Island of the Blue Dolphins. That Hatchet dork can keep his nasty ass turtle eggs.
oh shit yes. Hatchet kid had nothing on Blue Dolphin girl. She lasted YEARS.
Plus was based on a real person!
To this day I romanticize abalone.
YES! Karana all over everywhere slayin devilfish, making fences out of whalebones, taming otters and birds.
Highly influential to me as a kid, who did a lot of running around with feather necklaces trying to get my fat-ass, farty yellow lab to act like Rontu the hunting dog.
Devilfish yesssssss, she was spearin’ them bitches til the cows came home. Scott O’Dell made devilfish sound like the best-tasting fish ever, like, you’d sell your soul for it.
YEESSSSSSSSSSSS I always wanted to be here my entire life! She finally kills the squid! WHAT VICTORY.
The devilfish WAS A SQUID!?!? It’s like I’ve been living in the dark ages.
How long would you survive the Hatchet?
Do you take selfies and snapchat all day long? -> You die immediately.
Do you ask people questions that are easily google-able? -> You die immediately.
And of course the teenage version of me remembers, in the epilogue, Paulson writing that because Hatchet (the kid’s name is Hatchet, right?) lost so much weight and put on so much muscle during his experience, he never gained another pound in his life and remained skinny and buff forever.
And I was all JEALOUS.
Paulson writing that because Hatchet (the kid’s name is Hatchet, right?)
HAHAHA you’ve killed me, congratulations.
Also, survival in sufficiently rough conditions would … permanently transform your adipose cells into extra, possibly-superhuman, muscles? Suure, Hatchet.
His name was….Brian! (But Life of Brian was already taken)
Can you fashion a rudimentary lathe?
It says something about me that I read this as “Can you fashion a rudimentary latte?” and my immediate answer was an excited “Yes!”
Get off the line, Guy!
Does anyone else remember the Julie of the Wolves series? Being befriended by local wildlife seems a sound survival strategy, especially if said animal friends are at the top of the food chain and yet disinclined to eat you.
YA has taught me that I can totally be friends with wolves.
If I’m ever lost in the wilderness I will definitely die.
I remember Julie had bonded with the mother wolf by staring into her eyes until the mother looked away. I totally tried that with our standard poodle growing up.
I tried this with a woodchuck last week and it basically worked
In the pantheon of YA survival literature, it’s basically Julie of the Wolves > A Girl Named Disaster > Island of the Blue Dolphins > My Side of the Mountain > Hatchet.
WHAT KILLS ME IS THAT THERE WAS JUST ENOUGH SCIENCE IN THIS BOOK TO MAKE IT SEEM LEGIT BUT IN FACT YOU WOULD DIE, WOLVES DON’T EAT PEOPLE BUT THEY SURE AS FUCK WOULD GET SICK OF YOU POKING AROUND THEIR PACK ALL THE TIME AND PERFORMING DOMINANCE BEHAVIORS
The idea of being able to thrive Hatchet-style in the wilderness is a great fantasy for children which some people unfortunately carry into their adult lives.
(Not counting people who could actually thrive Hatchet-style in the wilderness here, I acknowledge their superiority to me.)
I would die of diabetes unless I found a pig and a needle with which to inject pig pancreas extract into myself. Of course this is assuming I didn’t die in the plane crash which I definitely would.
Right? My “survival in extreme conditions” mental narratives are always ruined by the voice in the back of my head patiently saying “once you lose/run out of your kidney medicine, it’s only a matter of weeks before you keel over for good”.
You need to apply some Gilligan’s Island to the YA survival theory and make a coconut-based insulin generator/dialysis machine! All you need is coconuts, which are rich and plentiful in the mountains!
I was obsessed with all those children’s and YA wilderness survival books when I was a kid. Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Julie of the Wolves, Baby Island (anyone remember that one?), etc. etc. I begged my (very non-wilderness survival type) parents to go camping over and over. Finally we went on a weekend trip when I was about eleven, and it was the most horrible thing I have ever experienced. I got attacked by yellow jackets the first night and swelled up horribly, and couldn’t find a place to sleep that didn’t leave me with rocks digging into my back. Then I got diarrhea the second day and spent probably hours sitting in a godawful portapotty. Worst experience ever, and I have never been camping since. Oddly, I still love wilderness survival books.
Baby Island!
Oh yes, do I ever remember that one! I’m pretty sure it was responsible for all my desert-island fantasies when I was 9 or 10.
…of course, I look back now and I’m like NO WIFI, NO PLUMBING, AND A JILLION BABIES? This is my private hell.
I REMEMBER BABY ISLAND! I was all “Seriously, you named your kids Elijah and Elisha? Those are almost exactly the same name.”
BABY ISLAND. Someone else read that book!!!!
BABY ISLAND! remains one of my core fantasies…send me to an island with a bunch of babies, STAT.
YEEEESSSSSSSS! I read the hell out of wilderness survival stories as a kid, and finally convinced my parents to send me to a wilderness sleepaway camp for two weeks as a kid. It was pure, unadulterated hell. Since then I will only “camp” if there is a mattress and indoor plumbing involved.
As a kid, I got to help determine for my elementary/middle school library what books should be deemed middle-schoolers-only or not, and Baby Island was the first one. I am pretty shocked to discover it wasn’t just something weird that only my Catholic School ended up with.
Hatchet gave me a terrible fear of heart attacks that lasts to this day. Hate that book.
I sort of love the idea of wilderness survival even though I never read this dumb book, only Swiss Family Robinson and the one where the boy gets trapped in an avalanche and stays alive stuck immobilized in a snow hole for like a few weeks by eating the raw chicken he has in his rucksack (???) and jogging in place so that he only loses his big toe and a few other, lesser toes upon rescue, while hallucinating and thinking of how everybody is going to respect him so much when this is all over (spoiler: they do.)
then I go back to my childhood house in the suburban wilds for a couple weeks and I remember why I never went outside much as a child and the answer is TICKS. ticks: the very worst. did Hatchet have to worry about ticks??? If not then he is not so tough.
Nope and in fact one of the great things about northern Canada/Alaska is that there are very few bugs to deal with. Mosquitoes the size of quarters in swarms of thousands but not much else to bother you.
Wait, what? Avalanche? Raw chicken? Jogging???
I had forgotten the title since I read it like 25 years ago but then I FOUND IT. Can’t brag too much about my research skills since a book about a boy trapped in an avalanche can only be called TRAPPED or AVALANCHE. It was the latter. By Arthur Roth. I was wrong, it was a raw grouse he eats, not a chicken. A “kid’s review” on Amazon declares it to be great for “people who like adventure, or gross things.”
another review helpfully reminds me of the part where he contemplates peeing on himself for warmth but then thinks better of it.
AAAAH but Arthur Roth also wrote a book called TRAPPED!, I had no idea! It is about a boy who crashes a car and is TRAPPED IN THE WILDERNESS. AND he wrote a book called “Two for Survival” about surviving in the mountains AND he wrote a book called “The Iceberg Hermit” about surviving on an iceberg WITH A POLAR BEAR FRIEND. I will have to read that immediately.
please excuse me, I am terribly excited.
These all sound incredible. Time for some marathon child survival reading!
The only ‘Child survives alone in the Wilderness’ book I have ever read is The Girl Who Love Tom Gordon, and in it she shits herself from drinking dirty river water, loses like a third of her body weight in a week and hallucinates the hell out of everything, and she’s only in there ten days.
Which feels like more like what would happen to me.
That’s very Mastercleanse of her.
I was assigned to write a book report on Hatched when I was in fourth grade. My book report basically read “this book is shitass boring and I hate it.”
I was forced to rewrite it, and have resented Gary Paulsen ever since.
While we’re on the subject of SURVIVING, Julie of the Wolves, amirite? I’ve been trying to communicate with squirrels by twitching my fingers for the past 20 years.
Reading this article was like getting an email that there are fresh cookies in the break room, and so you go into the break room but instead of cookies there is a professional dominatrix inside who yells at you and kicks your shins and makes you look at your ugly face in the mirror, and you just lay there in the fetal position sobbing about how you thought there’d be cookies.
I don’t minimize! I alt-TAB. *haughty snort*
Towards the beginning of Day of the Triffids the protagonist witnesses a young couple jump out a damn window because they’ve gone blind–they didn’t even know about the upcoming deadly plague or the roving killer plants at that point. They’ve just been blind for, like, 24 hours, so OBVIOUSLY it’s irreversible and society is over so it’s time to kill themselves! That’s my survival plan.
That is for sure my favorite thing about a lot of scifi/survival stories, are the rando background characters who inexplicably and violently overreact and die. They are sacrificed to The Gods Of Foreshadowing.
All I remember about this dumb book is that the kid throws up over and over and over.
Every single time I watch a movie where the love interest dangles helplessly from a tall building I count to two and then think, “I would be dead. I’d be dead right now. Remember that time at the water park you tried to do the glider and fell from like twenty feet? You have no upper body strength. Even leaving aside her extraordinary reporting abilities, Lois Lane would outlast you in a superhero movie simply from having stronger hands.”
This is embarrassingly accurate, and particularly shameful because that is one of my favorite books.
There was a book I had as a kid where the heroine wanted to run away from home for a little while to get her head together after her sibling died and her parents were terrible or something? She went to a camping store and got a bunch of freeze-dried food and other supplies, and stole a boat to get to an island where she’d been happy one summer, and Things Went Awry, as they are Wont To Do, and the boat wasn’t tied up well and she got stranded there until the water froze over enough for her to walk into town.
Does anyone else recognize this? Or did I make i up?
It’s “The Island Keeper,” by Harry Mazer. She does a lot of the same stuff as in “Hatchet,” but in way less detail and with less difficulty. I re-read it once after I read “Hatchet” and kept thinking, “It’s way harder to skin an elk than that!”
http://www.amazon.com/The-Island-Keeper-Harry-Maz…
I read My Side of the Mountain as a kid and loved it, so my teacher gifted me a copy of Hatchet, which was very thoughtful of her. Unfortunately, eight-year-old me thought it was boring as fuck.
Speaking of YA survival literature, does anyone remember A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer? It’s set in Mozambique in the early 1980s and is about a girl who steals a boat to run away from an arranged marriage, gets totally fucking lost, and basically lives for about a year on an island in the middle of a giant lake. She makes friends with a baboon tribe, hallucinates witches and river spirits, and basically lives in her own head for a lot of the time. Parts of it are heart-wrenching and parts are genuinely scary.
I don’t remember that but I do remember loving other Nancy Farmer books in my adolescence.
I was once voted Most Likely To Win The Hunger Games and Most Valuable Member Of Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Team by two different, unrelated organizations in college, and I cannot decide if that says good or bad things about me.
I think it’s probably because I know how to treat a snakebite with and without a first aid kit and can break a nose in a way that will hurt your or a way that will kill you.
I was once voted Most Likely To Win The Hunger Games and Most Valuable Member Of Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Team by two different, unrelated organizations in college, and I cannot decide if that says good or bad things about me.
I think it's probably because I know how to treat a snakebite with and without a first aid kit and can break a nose in a way that will hurt your or a way that will kill you.
That is for sure my favorite thing about a lot of scifi/survival stories, are the rando background characters who inexplicably and violently overreact and die. They are sacrificed to The Gods Of Foreshadowing.
WHAT KILLS ME IS THAT THERE WAS JUST ENOUGH SCIENCE IN THIS BOOK TO MAKE IT SEEM LEGIT BUT IN FACT YOU WOULD DIE, WOLVES DON'T EAT PEOPLE BUT THEY SURE AS FUCK WOULD GET SICK OF YOU POKING AROUND THEIR PACK ALL THE TIME AND PERFORMING DOMINANCE BEHAVIORS
After reading this book in fourth grade, I made a hatchet by fastening some pipe cleaners around some construction paper. I then used it to hack at my desk mate’s arm. She was complicit in the whole thing. I told her we might need food for later and she agreed this was the right thing to do. Once the teacher caught on to our plan, she turned on me. For this I was suspended. I will never forget that betrayal. Or that hunger.
I am quite certain I would last at least four pages into The Hatchet.
After reading this book in fourth grade, I made a hatchet by fastening some pipe cleaners around some construction paper. I then used it to hack at my desk mate's arm. She was complicit in the whole thing. I told her we might need food for later and she agreed this was the right thing to do. Once the teacher caught on to our plan, she turned on me. For this I was suspended. I will never forget that betrayal. Or that hunger.
I am quite certain I would last at least four pages into The Hatchet.
I had a mad crush on kid-in-the-hatchet when reading this book in 6th grade. not only is he resourceful and clever, but i realized that a life in the wilderness meant no parental supervision and limitless canoodling possibilities…