Hatchet by Gary Paulsen

Destroyed.

The word came. I would have been destroyed and torn and smashed. Driven into the rocks and destroyed.

Luck, he thought. I have luck, I had good luck there. But he knew that he was wrong. If he had had good luck his parents wouldn't have divorced because of the Secret and he wouldn't have been flying with a pilot who had a heart attack and he wouldn't be here where he had to have good luck to keep from being destroyed.

If you keep walking back from good luck, he thought, you'll come to bad luck.

I wanted to read Hatchet because I was a big fan of Dogsong, which I thought stood out as one of the best pieces of YA fiction I'd ever read. Hatchet is cut much from the same cloth: it is essentially about a boy having to survive in the wilderness, and through that survival he comes to what I suppose you could call manhood, or at least a greater understanding of himself and his world.

In Dogsong, the main character was trying to recover a way of life lost to his Eskimo kin; here in Hatchet, survival is an unwelcome necessity: Brian Robeson is on his way to visit his father in the Canadian oil fields when the pilot of the single-engine plane carrying him has a heart attack and Brian is forced to land the plane in a lake. All Brian has with him is a hatchet, with his mother--quite fortuitously, I might add--gave to him for his birthday. He also carries with him, in the metaphorical sense, a Terrible Secret that actually turns out to be a Pretty Banal Secret: He saw his mom kissing another man, which he knows (but his father does not) is the reason for his parents' impending divorce.

That causes him some added discomfort at the lake, but soon it fades into the background as Brian is forced to learn how to survive on his own--he quickly figures out how to forage for berries, and through a long, painstaking, incremental process figures out how to use the hatchet to build shelter, start a fire, catch and cook food. By the end of his ordeal, which lasts for a couple of months, Brian is a tanned, fit survival expert. It's like Survivor Man for the tween set.

There was a mystical element to Dogsong that helped it transcend its genre; Hatchet could have used something similar. What Paulsen accomplishes--a gripping YA book almost completely without dialogue--is arresting enough, but it seems awfully plain in the other novel's shadow. Its most glaring flaw is the awful subplot about Brian's parents and their divorce, which is completely useless, wisely dropped early on, and never resolved--only briefly referenced in the postscript. Still, it has a pretty solid pedigree as a YA book; but as I told Brent, don't waste your time if you haven't read Dogsong, which is its superior in every way.

Dogsong by Gary Paulsen

Out.

Into the sweeps, into the great places here the land runs to the sky and into the sky until there is no land and there is no sky.

Out.

Into the distance where all lines end and all lines begin. Into the white line of the ice-blink where the mother of wind lives to send down the white death of the northern storms.

Out.

Into the mother of wind and the father of blue ice.

Russel went out where there is nothing, into the wide center of everything there is.

Into the north.


As far as pure writing goes, I think there are very few young adult books I've read better than Dogsong--it's a powerful book and very poetic. I'm on record as saying that the tightness of young adult literature is routinely superior to adult fiction; postmodern books often seem to me to be weighted down by their own breadth and lack of focus. But YA books tend to be shallow and clumsy as well, so it's refreshing to read a book like this one that's well-written and lacks pandering.

Dogsong is the story of Russel Susskit, a native Eskimo boy who feels uneasy with the way his people have appropriated the ways of outsiders; you might say he has an old soul. His father is a chain-smoking Jesus freak but nevertheless senses the way his son feels and suggests he go visit with Oogruk, an old man who owns the village last dogsled. Oogruk lives in the old way, using seal oil for lamplight instead of electricity and covering his floor with skins. Oogruk teaches Russel to drive the dogsled--though his advice is less technical and more like "Be the dogs, Russell--be the dogs."

Eventually Russel comes to understand that he must take the dogs north on a survival trip. Not to anywhere particular, but just to do it, to recapture the spirit of his ancestors. I don't know, it sounds less cheesy when Paulsen writes it. He begins to have strange dreams of himself grown up, but in ancient times hunting mammoth, prophetic dreams prowhich lead to him saving the life of a young pregnant girl out on the ice.

There is a scene--and here is a major spoiler, so skip it if you like--where Russel helps the girl deliver her baby in their skin tent, and it is stillborn. I think it is a testament to Paulsen's ability that, unlike the deaths in Tuck Everlasting and Bridge to Terabithia, there is real sadness but also real understanding about the natural process that causes such a tragedy to occur.

I had to assign independent reading to my kids and, having never read this, assigned Call of the Wild to a few of the male students I thought needed real lessons in what it means to "be a man." I think that if I had to go back and do it again I would save a few slots for them to read Dogsong.