Gary Paulsen's Hatchet And The Rest Of The Brian Saga

Gary Paulsen: Brian Saga
Gary Paulsen has lived an exciting life, from traveling with a carnival to joining the Army at seventeen to surviving two plane crashes and multiple moose attacks. In this paper I will go over how all of his life experiences affected how he wrote his book Hatchet and the rest of the Brian Saga.

Paulsen was born on May 17th in 1939 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father was a career Army officer, who he didn’t meet until he was seven. He did not have such a good relationship with his mother as he spent his childhood hopping between relatives, until he left with his parents to the Philippines where his father was stationed. After two years he came home and ran away to join a carnival.

In an interview with TeachingBooks.net Paulsen was asked what inspired him to write Hatchet. At the beginning of Hatchet Brian is about to get on a plane to go to Alaska to visit his father after his parents got a divorce after his mother was seen with another man. This could be inspired by the fact that Paulsen never had a very good relationship with his parents. In

an interview with Teaching Books he said that a friend of his sons saw his mother kissing another man at the mall. After this Paulsen began writing Hatchet basing it off of the child’s life as well as his own.
In Hatchet Brian is “running away,” not from his parents or his troubles, but on an adventure. He is running away to his dad in Alaska to figure out the divorce. Paulsen ran away as a teen but not in the same context. He ran to get away from his parents who he says were the “town drunks.”

In Paulsen’s book Guts he describes the true events that inspired Hatchet and the rest of the Brian Saga. In the first chapter of the book he tells the story of when he was a volunteer paramedic and was responding to a heart attack call. On scene there was an unbearable stench and the victim was sitting in a chair grabbing at his left shoulder, his face gone grey. He did everything he could until he could get a helicopter to the nearest hospital, but the man eventually died before they arrived.
Around a week after the man’s heart attack, Paulsen witnessed a plane crash firsthand. From this Paulsen used everything he remembered to bring to life the scene in Hatchet where Brian’s pilot has the heart attack and dies while flying, forcing Brian to perform a crash landing into a lake in the Yukon.

Later on in the book Brian is attacked by a moose, which just so happens that Paulsen was attacked by a moose, twice infact. One of his experiences with a moose occurred while he was working on a farm when he was much younger. He and the farmer were driving through a field when all of a sudden a bull moose appeared out of the woods. Without even knowing what hit them, the moose dropped his head and charged. Nearly tipping the truck on it’s side and puncturing the radiator.

His second run-in with a moose was when he was in Alaska training for a sled dog race.

“I grew up hunting hunting and fishing in the north woods of Minnesota (...) And none of it had prepared me for the difference in moose- either in size or temperament” (Guts 41). While in the tundra, a five hundred pound cow moose appeared in the dead of the night and began attacking his dogs. He was woken up by what sounded like a scream. He stepped outside into the snow, barefoot in the middle of winter with his head lamp on and saw a moose stomping on his sled dogs. The only thing he had to defend his dogs with was a small axe that he used for chopping meat. Eventually, he warded off the moose and inspected his dogs. None had died, however two of them had suffered a broken leg and were out for the season. He says after that experience he has never been in the Alaskan wilderness without a

rifle.