From Chapter 1: Heart Attacks, Plane Crashes and Flying Perhaps the single most catastrophic event in Brian’s life in Hatchet is when the pilot dies of a heart attack. This forces Brian to fly the plane and land—in little more than an “aimed” crash—in a lake, where he swims free and saves himself. Before I was fortunate enough to become successful as a writer, I worked at home, writing as much as I could between construction jobs. Because I had so much downtime, I added my name to a list of volunteers available to answer emergency ambulance calls. My wife and I lived then in a small prairie town in the middle of farm country, near the confluence of two major highways. The volunteer service was small, and all we had was one old ambulance donated by a city that had bought new ones. But we were the only service available for thousands of square miles. We answered calls to highway wrecks, farm accidents, poisonings, gunshot accidents and many, many heart attacks. I would go out on the calls alone or with another man who also worked at home. I saw at least a dozen heart attack victims in the first year. Sadly, most of them were dead before I arrived. The distances we had to cover were so great that we simply could not get there in time to save them. If we did arrive before they died, we had to wait an hour or more for the “flight for life” chopper from the nearest city. Often it arrived too late. When I came to write Hatchet, I remembered one call to a small ranch some sixty miles northeast of Colorado Springs. It was early in the morning when the siren cut loose, and I ran half-dressed for my old truck, drove to the garage where the ambulance was kept and answered the phone hanging on the wall. “Please come quick!” a woman said. “It’s my Harvey. He’s having chest pains.” She gave me the location of the ranch and I took off. It should have taken me a full twenty minutes to get there because of the roughness of the gravel roads but I arrived in fourteen by driving like a maniac. It was just getting light as I ran into the house carrying our emergency bag, and I could smell what was happening as soon as I entered the kitchen. The lights were on and a man of about fifty was sitting at the kitchen table. His face was gray and he was holding his left shoulder with his right hand. He looked at me and smiled sheepishly, as if to apologize for the inconvenience, and started to say something but then stopped and looked again at the floor in what soldiers call the thousand-yard stare. His wife, a thin woman in jeans and a sweatshirt, stood by him, and she gave me what we called the Look—an expression that meant Thank God you’re here please save him please save him please save him. But the smell of methane was very strong and the gray look was very bad and as I reached for him to put him on his back, he jolted as if hit by electricity, stiffened in the kitchen chair and fell sideways to the floor. His eyes looked into mine. Directly into my eyes. “Call the hospital and tell them to bring the chopper now,” I said, and knelt to help him, but he was hit with another jolt that stiffened him and his eyes opened wide and the smell grew much stronger and I knew he was gone. 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. I kept at the CPR because the woman kept giving me the Look and I could not give up hope. But minutes passed and then half an hour before I heard the sound of the rotors—which was very good time, though much too late for this man—and I kept working on him though I knew he was dead and I had seen him die, seen him move from his life into his death, and though I had seen death many times before, I had not seen it in this way. Not in the way his eyes looked into mine while the life left him. Years later, when I came to write Hatchet and the scene where the pilot is dying, I remembered this man of all the men I saw dead from heart attacks and car wrecks and farm accidents. 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. Excerpted from Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books by Gary Paulsen, published by Laurel-Leaf Books.
