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.