Hatchet (9781442403321) by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online

up to somebody flying over and he didn’t want to diminish any chance he might have of being found.
    His eyes fell upon the stone ridge to his left and he thought at first he should build his shelter against the stone. But before that he decided to check out the far side of the ridge and that was where he got lucky.
    Using the sun and the fact that it rose in the east and set in the west, he decided that the far side was the northern side of the ridge. At one time in the far past it had been scooped by something, probably a glacier, and this scooping had left a kind of sideways bowl, back in under a ledge. It wasn’t very deep, not a cave, but it was smooth and made a perfect roof and he could almost stand in under the ledge. He had to hold his head slightly tipped forward at the front to keep it from hitting the top. Some of the tock that had been scooped out had also been pulverized by the glacial action, turned into sand, and now made a small sand beach that went down to the edge of the water in front and to the right of the overhang.
    It was his first good luck.
    No, he thought. He had good luck in the landing. But this was good luck as well, luck he needed.
    All he had to do was wall off part of the bowl and leave an opening as a doorway and he would have a perfect shelter—much stronger than a lean-to and dry because the overhang made a watertight roof.
    He crawled back in, under the ledge, and sat. The sand was cool here in the shade, and the coolness felt wonderful to his face, which was already starting to blister and get especially painful on his forehead, with the blisters on top of the swelling.
    He was also still weak. Just the walk around the back of the ridge and the slight climb over the top had left his legs rubbery. It felt good to sit for a bit under the shade of the overhang in the cool sand.
    And now, he thought, if I just had something to eat.
    Anything.
    When he had rested a bit he went back down to the lake and drank a couple of swallows of water. He wasn’t all that thirsty but he thought the water might help to take the edge off his hunger. It didn’t. Somehow the cold lake water actually made it worse, sharpened it.
    He thought of dragging in wood to make a wall on part of the overhang, and picked up one piece to pull up, but his arms were too weak and he knew then that it wasn’t justthe crash and injury to his body and head, it was also that he was weak from hunger.
    He would have to find something to eat. Before he did anything else he would have to have something to eat.
    But what?
    Brian leaned against the rock and stared out at the lake. What, in all of this, was there to eat? He was so used to having food just be there, just always being there. When he was hungry he went to the icebox, or to the store, or sat down to a meal his mother cooked.
    Oh, he thought, remembering a meal now—oh. It was last Thanksgiving, last year, the last Thanksgiving they had as a family before his mother demanded the divorce and his father moved out in the following January. Brian already knew the Secret but did not know it would cause them to break up and thought it might work out, the Secret that his father still did not know but that he would try to tell him. When he saw him.
    The meal had been turkey and they cooked it in the back yard in the barbecue over charcoal with the lid down tight. His father had put hickory chips on the charcoal and the smell of the cooking turkey and the hickory smoke had filled the yard. When his father took the lid off, smiling, the smell that had come out was unbelievable, and when they sat to eat the meat was wet with juice and rich and had the taste of the smoke in it . . .
    He had to stop this. His mouth was full of saliva and his stomach was twisting and growling.
    What was there to eat?
    What had he read or seen that told him about food in the wilderness? Hadn’t there been something? A show, yes, a show on television about air force