Kids into books: Hatchet - The Truth

Author: Gary Paulsen

Age: 10+ years

Illustrator: Mark Taylor

Publisher: Macmillan, $14.95


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.

In some strange warp of fate I was to witness an aeroplane crash, or its immediate aftermath, almost exactly one week after that man died. This would also go into Hatchet.

Few people realise that the land rises southeast of Denver, just as it does to the west, where the Rockies lie. Grass hills slope gently upward, slightly higher than Denver airport, for fifty or sixty miles, then taper off into the prairies of Kansas.

One pilot did not check his charts and took off from Denver at a low altitude, thinking that the ground would fall away gently below him. He hit the top six feet of a dirt ridge at 180 knots cruising speed. I was on the scene within four hours of the crash and the only recognisable item ws the engine, a crumpled ball of steel and oil stains.