Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books, by Gary Paulsen

[rachelmanija]

I was upside down in a pile of dogs, all howling over the roar of the engine, when I heard the pilot scream, "There's too much weight in the tail! Throw the dogs forward or we're going down!"

I was still wearing my full winter gear, which included a down parka, and the dogs bit me and the pilot and ripped my parka so that soon the plane was filled with small white feathers and flying dogs and swear words and blood.

Only Gary Paulsen. He's to wild winter tales what Adrian Tchaikovsky is to bugs.

The true stories behind his books are much more OTT than the books themselves. I hate to doubt a person's word just because their stories seem unlikely considering how much hard-to-believe stuff has actually happened to me, but I can't help wondering if Paulsen just heard some stories and then said he saw them happen. Specifically, the plane he witnessed crashing in the ocean when he was a child on the boat that went to rescue the survivors, only to witness them all get eaten by sharks a la Quint's story from Jaws. ("The sailors were literally pulling people out of sharks' mouths." REALLY?) Or the kid he saw get killed by a deer he was feeding in front of a "Don't Feed The Deer" sign. I 100% believe the dog-and-plane story though.

Be that as it may, this book is pure distilled essence of Paulsen: nature and its dangers and beauty and grossness and violence, hunting and survival and life and death. And flying dogs.

Comments

[magistrate]

Have you encountered Craig Childs' stuff? I've read... roughly 2.1 of his books (The Animal Dialogues and Finders Keepers), but I've enjoyed what I read. In particular, The Animal Dialogues is a series of reflections on interactions he'd had with wild animals (even when the interaction is limited to following a trail for a while) and musings and research and a lot of interesting zoological and ethological notes on them. Some of which fell into that vaguely creepy, numenous hinterland of "This is outside of my conception of the way in which the world operates, but not very far outside, so I had a pleasant frission of Oh... I hadn't thought that was possible.

(Finders Keepers is a fascinating-to-me exploration of the thorny practical and moral issues of archaeology, relic hunting, relic trades, and relic obsessions, and the issue of just who owns the past and what our relationship to its leavings should be.)

[rachelmanija]

No! I never even heard of him before. That sounds really neat.

[wpadmirer]

I read Winterdance and loved it. I'm going to have to check out more of his stuff. Especially if there are dogs involved.

[wolby]

I had a long wilderness-survival-novel phase in elementary school, including Paulson, so this sounds like something I should read! Thank you for letting me know it exists.

[lilacsigil]

The shark thing really did happen to US sailors in the Pacific and Indian Oceans at least 3 times in WWII so maybe those stories had a big impact on him!

[magistrate]

...randomly, as I think about it, I had a roommate who grew up in rural Wisconsin – the kind of area where one could bow-hunt deer in the middle of town – who hated deer with a deep and abiding passion, and found them unbearably creepy. As I recall, one of the reasons they thought this had to do with a childhood sighting of a dear eating some form of carrion, possibly the corpse of another deer.

Which, as it turns out, is not all that uncommon.

I mean, none of this is specifically about deer killing people, but in general I'm 100% willing to believe that any wild animal will kill a human if it has the ability and feels provoked into doing so. And then possibly eat the corpse, for good measure. And deer are certainly big and muscular enough to deal some damage, especially to a child.