Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books

“There was, of course, hope—there is always hope. Even when I was called to car accidents and saw children I knew were dead, I would keep working on them because I could not bring myself to accept their death—the hope would not allow it—and I worked on this man now though the smell came up and the skin grew cold.”

Paulsen, a volunteer ambulance driver in rural America, is called to the scene of a heart attack victim. He arrived in roughly half an hour just in time to watch Hector, the victim, look directly into his eyes and die. It was this death, of the many he witnessed, that inspired the pilot in Hatchet, who also perishes of a heart attack. Unbeknownst to the author, he would die in a way strikingly similar to Hector, at home of cardiac arrest, acutely aware of what was happening to him because of his many exposures to heart-related incidents.

“I remembered him and his eyes and I put him in the plane next to Brian because he was, above all things, real, and I wanted the book to be real. But I did not sleep well that night when I wrote him into the book and I will not sleep well tonight thinking of his eyes.”

After telling the story of Hector, a man Paulsen attempted to save from cardiac arrest while working as a volunteer ambulance driver, Paulsen shows how the experience stayed with him and became fodder for his creative work years later. The raw honesty of Hatchet, coupled with the simple language and accessible plot make the novel a timeless bildungsroman. The parallel reality of events in Hatchet and events in Paulsen’s life give each scene the weight and authority that has made this book relevant decades after publication.

“Now I was falling, and falling fast, toward a wilderness I was unprepared to deal with; I had the wrong clothes, no weapon, no survival gear except for a sleeping bag and the plane’s emergency kit. In a very real way, I had become the Brian Robeson I would soon write about.”

While on a book tour of remote Alaska, Paulsen’s bush plane goes down, ultimately landing gracefully on a frozen river. The sensation of the world suddenly changing from manageable and beautiful to terrifying and out-of-control was one that Paulsen would later write into Hatchet. The rawness of the sensations Brian endured in Hatchet are real because they were experienced by the author. Where Brian’s mind goes blank before leaping into action, Paulsen’s immediately began planning ways to survive in the wild. In many ways, Paulsen was Brian, fulfilled, who grew up to be a survivalist and author. There is no clear line between where the character begins and ends, and where the author does.

“I started out in a small Aeronca Champ, a two-seater with one seat behind the other. The instructor’s name was Joe and he sat in the back and we took off and I will never forget the movement when the wheels first broke free of the runway and the plane slid a. Bit to the side. It was an incredible feeling of freedom, as the earth no longer held me, and I knew then I was doomed, doomed to always love flying.”

After leaving the military, Paulsen briefly took flying lessons. During his first lesson, the sensation of being untethered made Paulsen a life-long fan of aviation. He would later give up lessons because of the high cost but regretted abandoning a hobby he enjoyed so thoroughly. Later, when writing the scene where the pilot dies and Brian must land the plane on a lake, Paulsen used his extensive knowledge of bush plane piloting to create a plausible scenario where an untrained child might successfully land a plane alone.

“I have spent an inordinate amount of time in wilderness woods, much of it in northern Minnesota, some in Canada and some in the Alaskan wilds. I have hunted and trapped and fished and have been exposed to almost all kinds of wilderness animals; I’ve had bear come at me, been stalked by mountain lion, been bitten by snakes and punctured by porcupines and torn by foxes and once pecked by an attacking raven, but I have never seen anything rivaling the madness that seems to infect a large portion of the moose family.”

Although Paulsen is clearly a wilderness and survival expert, there is one creature he has not, and will not understand: the moose. Paulsen allots an entire chapter to the irreconcilable “madness” of the moose, with a half dozen stories of moose attacks and encounters. For Paulsen, the moose represents the unknowable part of nature. No matter how much time he spends in the wild and how close he gets to nature, there will always be mystery.

“The legal hunting seasons were in fall and winter, but sometimes I hunted in spring as well, and it gave me food at times when my parents were on long drunks and didn’t keep the refrigerator filled.”

Paulsen does not write of his parents, family, or home life in Guts, but his parents are briefly mentioned here, where they are described as neglectful and distracted by addiction. Later, he describes his parents as unaware of his whereabouts and unconcerned about his welfare. For Paulsen, the wilderness became his home and his happy place. The wilderness provided, where his parents did not, and he was embraced by the forest.

“I know she was an animal. And that we are supposedly superior to animals (though I doubt we are very much superior.) I understand all that. I know we are supposed to temper judgement with wisdom and logic. But in all honesty if somebody came to me now as I was sitting at my computer and said they had found that moose and I would only have to walk seven or eight hundred miles to get her, I would grab a rifle and go for it.”

At many points in Hatchet and in the Brian series, animals attack and the attacks are not taken personally. Animals attack out of hunger or instinct or both, but for Paulsen, this single moose attack was different. Later, he says, “she made it personal, as the moose that went after Brian made it personal,” and Paulsen wrote this uniquely human perception of moose attacks into Hatchet (49).

“We have grown away from knowledge, away from knowing what something is really like, toward knowing only what somebody else says it is like. There seems to be a desire to ignore the truth in favor of drama.”

Paulsen’s stories do not offer direct moral or thematic commentary on the content, and Guts follows that trend. This rare exception stands out because Paulsen so carefully crafts his work to be interpreted by the reader, rather than hand-fed by the author. However, Chapter 3 begins and ends on the idea that knowledge is the thing that dispels ignorance and enables survival, demonstrating the theme of The Value of Inherited and Invented Knowledge. However acquired, Paulson believes, and boldly states, that knowledge is what saves those who have it, and dooms those who do not.

“I have a theory that because the summers are so short, the northern mosquitos are particularly vicious; they have very little time to hunt, feed, lay their eggs in water and repeat the cycle before the onset of winter, so the ones that attack efficiently and survive then reproduce their genes in the northern mosquito population.”

For Paulsen, insects represent the most torturous and difficult part of wilderness survival. In Hatchet, Paulsen claims to have been kind to Brian by only torturing him with mosquitos, rather than the multitude of blood-sucking insects that rule the short summers of the Northwoods. This passage shows that although there are harrowing and horrible parts of nature, Paulsen accepts these along with the beauty and spiritual-like sensation that washes over him in nature. Paulsen, who believes in The Necessity of Accurately Portraying the Wild, demonstrates the dangers, the pains, the torments of nature, and balances these with the serenity, beauty and calm that nature offers. He does not paint it as a utopia, but, as always, as honest and raw and thus, real.

“In the wilderness, it’s simply amazing how often a small thing can almost instantly snowball into a life-threatening disaster.”

Guts is the thematically-organized collection of stories that inspired Hatchet, and as such, the collection is mostly comprised of disaster scenarios in nature. Many of these stories begin with simple missteps or moments of ignorance that result in injury or death. For Paulsen, and for Brian, much of survival depends on luck. Whether or not there is sufficient food, whether or not the water is potable, whether or not an animal will attack or an insect bite will get infected, can depend more on luck than anything. With this, Paulsen strips some of his expertise away, shedding his ego in the process, and presents survivalism as a delicate balance of skill and luck—with gratitude for both.

“The point, and here is something I learned slowly and sometimes the hard way, is that it often seems that everything in the wilderness is conspiring to harm you in one way or the other, and this can lead to almost absurd occurrences.”

For Paulsen, the wilderness was a place of calm and peace, but also of staggering danger. Throughout Guts, Paulsen shares short quips about sudden, violent deaths at nature’s hand. Following this quote, a man dies of an allergic reaction to poison ivy. Preceding this quote, a man dies of malnourishment because he didn’t know he couldn’t survive on meat alone. For Paulsen, some of the danger can be mitigated by knowledge, but he recognizes and respects the randomness and absurdity of nature’s cruel side.

“The solution to facing all these dangers, a solution that came very rapidly to me and to Brian, is knowledge. It can come from anywhere; from reading, from listening to people or from personal experience. However it comes, the knowledge must be there.”

After recounting a series of lethal and near-lethal experiences in the wilderness, Paulsen concludes that along with luck, knowledge is the difference maker. Having seen death in various forms and in great numbers, Paulsen believes that there are things that can be done to increases one’s chance of survival, though only marginally. And this marginal difference explains why some people are able to survive while others die.

“It was all wrong, of course, and illegal and very un-sporting, To use a rifle on a duck, to shoot it sitting. All wrong. I would hunt ducks many more times, with a single-barrel 12-gauge shotgun, and I would shoot them flying with No.4 shot, and I would remember some of them, many of them.”

At age 12, Paulsen acquired a .22 rifle and, alone, shot his first bird in the woods. Later he would learn that this was not done correctly, and he corrected the mistake through education. A theme of importance throughout Guts is The Value of Inherited and Invented Knowledge. In this context, knowledge is vital to surviving morally, as well as simply surviving. With this, Paulson demonstrates the delicate balance between surviving and surviving with dignity. Later, Paulsen would learn that the method his uncles used to hunt deer by driving them toward a firing line, was also unnatural and thus lacking in dignity for the animals and their predators, mankind.

“The wilderness pulled at me—still does—in a way that at first battled me and then became a wonder for me.”

Throughout Guts, and in Hatchet and many of Paulsen’s works, nature has a mystical and magical pull to the protagonist and the author. It is an irresistible magnetism that draws Paulsen back into the wild throughout his life. In the fourth book of the Hatchet series, Brian is struggling in society and his psychologist suggests he go back to the wilderness, which he does, and finds peace. Brian was meant to be in the woods, just as Paulsen describes his childhood in the woods.

“There are people who say that is wrong, and perhaps they are right— though virtually nothing in nature dies of old age except man and I’m not sure of the morality or immorality of their claim or why it is better for a coyote to kill a rabbit than it is for a man who will also eat the rabbit— but these questions did not exist then for most people.”

As a boy, Paulsen would hunt, trap, and fish for food. Sometimes he would sell the rabbits for 10 cents apiece, making over $2.00 a day from his network of traps. He would feed himself from grouse and deer that he hunted, and he funded the purchase of his clothing and food through these activities. Born in 1939, Paulsen indeed inhabited a different economy. Neglected by his parents, Paulsen was also responsible for feeding himself.

“There are only two things that stand out and cause the hair to go up on the back of your neck. One is a sudden silence; during day and night, during rain, even during snow, there is some sound, and when it quits it almost always means that something not good is happening.”

Paulsen’s understanding of the wild, even as a youth, comes across in his explanation of the two types of sounds in nature that signal sudden change. The first is sudden silence, and the second is a rush of loud noise. Both signal danger and possible death. For both, Paulsen offers examples from his lived or encountered experiences. This passage, and this hyper-awareness to his surroundings in nature, demonstrate again how comfortable Paulsen is in nature, and how that acute attention informs the creation of the setting in Hatchet.

“His eyes were glazed and gone and he wasn’t breathing. I felt the sadness that comes with killing when you hunt but also the elation that comes with having succeeded— it makes for an odd mixture of emotions.”

After killing a charging buck, Paulsen explains the contradicting wave of emotions that wash over the nature-loving hunter after a kill. For Brian, who was forced to kill to survive in the wild, the act of taking a life was devastating and necessary. For Paulsen, the situation was less dire, but still he felt the mix of emotions that would later come to inhabit Brian.

“The wolves came not too long after midnight, brought by the smell of blood and meat.”

Paulsen kills a massive buck in a swamp and struggles to haul it out, only to have wolves circle around his kill. Eventually he gets the buck to his bike, where he slowly pushes it home. This long scene is nearly a direct replica of Earnest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, wherein a determined old fisherman catches a massive marlin only to have it taken apart by sharks. Both the famous novel and Paulsen’s story demonstrate the power of determination in man-versus-nature sagas.

“There are two main drives in nature: to survive and to reproduce. But the primary drive is to survive, for reproducing cannot occur without survival. In most of nature, the most important element of survival is finding food.”

Chapter 6 includes a thorough breakdown of the various ways to cook game in the wild, including how to boil water, how to prepare the meat and how to heat it to a safe temperature. Interestingly, the memoir does not mention reproduction again, the second of nature’s imperatives. Paulsen’s content and language in Guts remains child-friendly in nature, mirroring his coming-of-age novels.

“When I first started to do this I found that luck had a large part to play in whether I ate, as it did with Brian. But as with Brian, two fundamentals had a great influence on my life. The first was the concept of learning. I went from simply walking through the woods, bullying my way until something moved for me to try a shot at, to trying to understand what I saw, and from that, to “feeling” what the woods were about: a sound here, a movement there, a line that looked out of place or curved the wrong way, a limb that moved against the wind at the wrong time or a smell that was wrong.”

Again, Paulsen’s belief that luck plays a part in survival, but can be mitigate through knowledge, resurfaces with more explanation in this segment. Here, Paulsen shows how he transformed himself from a novice in the woods into an expert hunter by simply listening to what the woods could teach him. There was no teacher except nature. Paulsen taught himself, which he then allowed Brian to do in Hatchet. Because Paulsen lived the experience, Brian’s actions in Hatchet were real, believable, and honest.

“And not just one of these things, not a single one but all of them mixed together, entered into my mind to make me a part of the woods, so that I came to know some things that were going to happen before they happened: which way a grouse would probably fly, how a rabbit or deer would run or what cover it would make for next.”

Here Paulsen demonstrates his deep appreciation and respect for nature, and his role within it. He understands himself as a predator, but one who is successful because he works within the rules and realms of nature rather than against it. Paulsen opposes the method in which some hunters drive deer toward firing lines or lie in wait above baited traps. Paulsen sees hunting as a craft, and himself an artist who paints within the color palette of the canvas of nature.

“To learn, to be willing to learn how a thing works, to understand an animal in nature, or how to write a book or run a dog team or sail a boat, to always keep learning is truly wonderful.”

Paulsen’s life was filled with adventure. From his time in the woods as a youth, to the military, to his volunteer ambulance work, to sailing, to dog sledding and running the Iditarod, to writing books and going on tour—all of it was possible because Paulsen was willing to be a life-long learner. He never let ego suggest that he already knew everything, and thus, he was able to make the world of possibilities widen infinitely outward.

“We take so much for granted when it comes to eating that we almost always forget how easy we have it.”

Paulsen’s sixth chapter in Guts is a chapter about cooking in nature. Here, he demonstrates how much time a person spends in the wild on food. Not just hunting and preparing the meat, but in foraging, finding water, preparing ingredients, and making them safe to consume. With this, Paulsen demonstrates how easy modern society has made survival, and how far removed the human population has become from the food source.