Middle School Adventure Book

Thirteen-year-old Brian is in a small bush plane on his way to visit his father, as this middle school book opens. As the plane flies over the forested wilderness of northern Canada, the pilot teaches him a few basics of flying, but then has a heart attack and dies. Brian crash lands in a lake and somehow manages to make it to shore.

His first days in the forest are a nightmare of shock, hunger, and blood-thirsty mosquitoes. He expects to be rescued at any moment, but then he remembers that when the pilot died, the plane veered off course.

The searchers won’t know where to look.

Now he’ll have to survive in the wilderness. He builds a makeshift shelter, finds berries and turtle eggs to eat, and even figures out how to start a fire by striking the hatchet against rock to make sparks. He survives encounters with a bear, a porcupine, and a moose. He climbs a ridge and builds a signal fire, ready to be lit if a plane ever flies over. But when he does see a plane, by the time he lights the fire the plane has turned back, bringing him to a low point of despair.

Brian is level-headed and resourceful, usually able to summon up the perseverance to keep going through all obstacles. He quickly learns that the first law of the wild is to find food; that and keeping a fire going take up most of each day. I especially liked the way he grew and changed through this experience, for one thing realizing he must take full responsibility for himself, and for another, becoming so attuned to the wilderness and the birds and animals he shares it with, that he sees himself as a part of nature.

Author Gary Paulsen lived through everything in the book, from a forced landing in a light plane to surviving in the woods with next to nothing. He even made himself to eat a raw turtle egg, which, he reports, “tasted something like old motor oil or tired Vaseline.”

Reading level: Twelve and up. Parent and teachers will have to decide whether or not these rather adult themes are right for their children or students: Brian makes a suicide attempt when he is feeling very low; he’s dealing with his parents’ divorce and the knowledge he has about his mother’s infidelity; the death of the pilot and seeing his remains later on down in the water is vividly written, so perhaps not for squeamish readers.

Published in 1987

185 pages

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