72 pages • 2 hours read
Gary PaulsenHatchet
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Some time has passed since the airplane flew by. Brian is now so good at catching fish that he has tired of their meat. Instead, he hunts “foolbirds,” which taste like chicken. As he hunts a foolbird, he notices an unfamiliar presence. He turns and sees wolves staring at him. Brian’s fear quickly dissipates as he acknowledges the wolves’ power. He smiles and nods at the wolves, and they turn and leave.
Brian thinks about how much he has changed since “he had died and been born as the new Brian” (115). He recounts the depression that overtook him after the plane left; he took his hatchet up to the ridge and tried to kill himself. The next morning he awoke and saw the blood from the hatchet wounds and “hated the blood, hated what he had done to himself when he was the old Brian and was weak” (117). He decides to never be that weak again, to not “let death in again” (117). He calls the time before the suicide attempt the old time and everything after is the new time.
After his suicide attempt, Brian doubled down his effort to make a bow and arrow. He didn’t catch any fish until he remembered that water refracts light. Once he understood this, he caught his first fish and fried it over his fire. He returned to the lake over and over, feasting on fish meat so much that he grew tired of it. This experience gave him “hope in his knowledge. Hope in the fact that he could learn and survive and take care of himself” (120).
Chapter 14 Summary
Survival is all about learning from mistakes to avoid catastrophe. Brian compares the stakes between mistakes made back home in a city to those made out in the wilderness. If he breaks a bone or gets sick in the city, he can get help. If he makes a mistake that leads to an injury or doesn’t properly stockpile and prepare in the wild, he will die.
Brian recalls a mistake he made early in his new time, when he woke to find a skunk digging for the eggs. He threw sand at the skunk to shoo it away. The skunk sprayed Brian directly in the face from a close distance, causing him to go temporarily blind. The skunk dug up and ate the eggs while Brian tried to wash his eyes out in the lake. His eyes burned for days. The lesson he takes from this is that it was a mistake to leave his food unprotected, as all the forest’s creatures are on a perpetual search for food. He realizes he must make a stronger shelter and a system to protect his food.
Brian spends three days rebuilding his shelter, weaving doors and walls out of branches. He then builds a ladder to reach a high natural ledge in the stone wall of his shelter. He covers it with a door woven of willow. This woven door inspires him to create a net, which he uses in the lake to make a small fishpond. He lures the fish into the pond with leftover fried fish, then traps live fish there, making them easy to catch whenever he gets hungry.
Chapter 15 Summary
Brian scratches marks on the stone wall to count days, but he really tracks time through important events, such as “the day of First Meat” (129). He recounts his desperate craving for meat other than fish. That craving drove him to study the foolbirds (so nicknamed for their foolish behavior) until he could recognize their shape and sneak up on them with his spear before they flew off. He recalls how difficult it was to catch a bird, and how strange to clean and defeather it before roasting it over the fire. It was difficult to cook the bird without burning the outside, and Brian desperately wanted to taste the meat before it was cooked through. But he reminded himself that “so much of this was patience—waiting and thinking and doing things right” (136). Finally, with the feathers saved for arrows and the bird cooked, Brian took his first bite: “Never. Never in all the food […] never never never had he tasted anything as fine as that first bite. First Meat” (137).
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
Chapter 13 opens with a deceptively simple line: “Brian stood at the end of the long part of the L of the lake and watched the water, smelled the water, listened to the water, was the water” (113). Having ended Chapter 12 with Brian in depression, we are now presented with a new Brian, one who is strong and one with nature. He effortlessly captures fish, thinking of nothing else other than what he will eat next. When he senses a presence behind him and turns to face a wolf, “he knew the wolf now, as the wolf knew him, and he nodded to it, nodded and smiled” (115).
Brian seems to become fearless, calm, and centered due to his increased familiarity with his surroundings, but it is revealed that Brian achieves a new self-awareness after his suicide attempt. Having experienced the consequences of hopelessness, of holding on so tightly to the past and the desire to return home, Brian now knows just how important it is to fight for his life. He describes himself as “new” after attempting suicide. He is now determined not to “die, he would not let death in again” (117). He repeatedly refers to mistakes, implying that his suicide was perhaps his greatest mistake, but like all the rest, he must use this experience to learn rather than to fuel regret and pessimism. From this point on, Brian is stronger, stable, and “full of tough hope” (120).
Although the reader might expect Brian’s rescue to be the story’s climax, it is his recovery and personal transformation after attempting suicide that serves as the climax. The novel suggests that Brian has to transform and experience this painful personal growth before he can be free of the wilderness. It is only when he has internalized the lessons learned from his surroundings that he can really be free: “So much of this was patience—waiting and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking” (136). Ultimately, this patience is the key to getting rescued. Brian must be patient and do “things right” to procure the survival pack with the radio transmitter that leads a pilot directly to him.
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