Gary Paulsen · 1987 · survival

Gary Paulsen's 1987 survival novel, a Newbery Honor. Thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson is flying north in a small bush plane to visit his father in the Canadian oil fields when the pilot dies of a heart attack. Brian crash-lands in a remote forest lake and must survive alone with nothing but the clothes he wears and the hatchet his mother gave him. The exact place is never named, because Brian himself is lost: this is the wilderness of the Canadian north, somewhere along his vanished flight path.

1. 1
   Hampton, New York

   Brian Robeson, thirteen, boards a Cessna bush plane at a small airfield in Hampton, near the Vermont line. His parents have just divorced; he is flying north to spend the summer with his father in the Canadian oil fields, carrying a secret about his mother and, on his belt, the hatchet she gave him as a parting gift.

2. 2
   The L-shaped lake

   Over the northern forest the pilot dies of a heart attack, and Brian flies on alone until the fuel runs out, ditching into an L-shaped lake. He climbs out with only his clothes and the hatchet, and across fifty-four days he learns to make fire, to hunt and to shelter, outlasting a moose, a tornado and his own despair, until a desperate dive recovers the sunken plane's survival pack and its emergency beacon. (The book never says where this is; Brian is lost, so the spot is a stand-in for the unnamed Canadian north.)

3. 3
   The oil fields

   The beacon he had given up as broken brings a passing bush plane down onto the lake, and Brian is lifted out at last. He finishes the summer with his father in the oil fields he set out for, up where the forest thins toward the tundra, no longer the boy who climbed aboard in Hampton.