Guts Read Free Page B

the movement when the wheels first broke free of the runway and the plane slid a bit to the side. It was an incredible feeling of freedom, as if the earth no longer held me, and I knew then I was doomed, doomed to always love flying.
    I kept up the lessons and soloed in the Aeronca, but with the freedom of flight came additional knowledge—that flying was very expensive. I made a decision then that was foolish and that I have regretted ever since: I had wasted so much time in the army, had fallen so far behind in my life (I thought), that if I was to support a family and have a career in aerospace engineering I could not spend the time and money it would take to get my pilot’s license. So I stopped. I would take it up again, now that I have more time and some money, but my heart has gone bad and I wouldn’t be able to get a license because of my health.
    But I had soloed, I had learned to fly, and the knowledge stayed with me and became part of Brian when I put him in the plane and made him fly.

CHAPTER 2
    MOOSE ATTACKS
    . . . he saw a brown wall of fur detach itself from the forest to his rear and come down on him like a runaway truck. He just had time to see that it was a moose . . . when it hit him.
    HATCHET
    I have spent an inordinate amount of time in wilderness woods, much of it in northern Minnesota, some in Canada and some in the Alaskan wilds. I have hunted and trapped and fished and have been exposed to almost all kinds of wilderness animals; I’ve had bear come at me, been stalked by a mountain lion, been bitten by snakes and punctured by porcupines and torn by foxes and once pecked by an attacking raven, but I have never seen anything rivaling the madness that seems to infect a large portion of the moose family.
    I first witnessed this insanity when I was twelve, in northern Minnesota. I had just started hunting with a rifle. Back then there were none of today’s modern hunting weapons and I was, to put it mildly, financially disadvantaged. I worked hard at setting pins in a bowling alley, selling newspapers in bars at night and laboring on farms in the summer (hoeing sugar beets for eleven dollars an acre and picking potatoes for five cents a bushel) to make enough money to buy clothing and supplies for school. There was little left for fancy weapons, and after saving for a long time I finally managed to come up with enough money for a Remington single-shot .22 rifle. It was bolt action, with a twist safety on the rear of the bolt, and had to be loaded for each shot by opening the bolt, which extracted the empty shell if you had just fired. Then you put a new cartridge into the chamber by hand, closed the bolt and fired. It was a long process and the end result was that it forced the shooter to pay attention to his first shot and make certain it was accurately placed. It also made the hunter careful not to waste his shot. Within a short time I was very accurate with this little rifle and was steadily bringing home rabbits and ruffed grouse, which I cleaned and cooked.
    Just as they do today, game wardens had a great deal of say in how game laws were enforced, and if a family was poor or there were other special conditions, the wardens would sometimes overlook minor infractions. The legal hunting seasons were in fall and winter, but sometimes I hunted in spring as well, and it gave me food at times when my parents were on long drunks and didn’t keep the refrigerator filled. I would like to thank those game wardens who looked the other way now and then when they saw a scruffy kid come out of the woods with a not-quite-legal grouse or rabbit hanging on his belt.
    Before I acquired that rifle, I had hunted a great deal with a bow, but on the day of my first moose incident I had been out with the rifle only a few times. It was early spring in the north woods of Minnesota, not far from the Canadian border, and I had seen many rabbits but hadn’t shot any. I wanted grouse because I liked