Kids into books: Hatchet – The Truth

Author: Gary Paulsen

Age: 10+ years

Illustrator: Mark Taylor

Publisher: Macmillan, $14.95


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 north-east 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.