Hatchet Summary

Hatchet has 19 numbered chapters plus an epilogue. The chapters are unnamed and short, and the structure tracks Brian's competence rather than the calendar:

The crash (chapters 1-4)

• 1. Brian boards the Cessna for the oil fields, thinking about the divorce and the Secret
• 2. The pilot has a heart attack and dies; Brian takes the controls and calls for help on the radio
• 3. The fuel runs out and he chooses an L-shaped lake to come down in
• 4. The crash, the swim to shore, and waking up battered on a beach

Hunger and the first fire (chapters 5-9)

• 5. He takes stock: no food, no matches, a hatchet on his belt, and clouds of mosquitoes
• 6. He finds "gut cherries" and eats far too many of them
• 7. The raspberry patch — and the bear that lets him walk away
• 8. A porcupine gets into his shelter at night; he throws the hatchet, it strikes stone, and he sees sparks
• 9. After hours of work he finally builds a fire, the turning point of the book

Learning to live (chapters 10-15)

• 10. Turtle eggs, and the discipline of keeping the fire alive
• 11. His first attempts at fish, and the problem of refracted light
• 12. A search plane passes overhead without seeing him; this is Brian's lowest point
• 13. "The new Brian" — he builds a bow, catches fish and stops waiting to be saved
• 14. A skunk raids his camp and sprays him; he rebuilds stronger
• 15. Foolbirds, and his first meat

The moose, the tornado and the pack (chapters 16-19)

• 16. A moose attacks him in the shallows, and a tornado destroys the camp the same night
• 17. The storm has lifted the plane's tail out of the lake; he starts building a raft
• 18. He cuts into the fuselage, drops the hatchet, dives for it, and sees the pilot's face
• 19. He opens the survival pack, switches on a transmitter that seems dead — and a plane lands

Epilogue

The closing pages step outside the story to explain the rescue, count the fifty-four days, and describe which of the changes in Brian turned out to be permanent.

This Hatchet summary begins in a small Cessna 406 flying north over the Canadian wilderness. Brian Robeson is thirteen, his parents have just divorced, and he is being flown to spend the summer with his father in the oil fields. He is barely listening to the pilot, because he is thinking about the Secret: some weeks earlier he saw his mother in a station wagon with a man with short blond hair, and he has not told his father. At the airport his mother gave him a hatchet in a leather sheath, and he wore it on his belt because it seemed easier than arguing.

The pilot begins rubbing his shoulder, then his stomach, and then dies of a heart attack at the controls. Brian is alone in a flying plane. He manages to level it, finds the radio and reaches a distant voice that fades out before it can help him. He flies until the fuel runs out — hours of it — and then picks the only thing that looks survivable, a long L-shaped lake, and puts the plane into the water. He gets out through the shattered windshield, swims up, and passes out on the shore, bruised and cut and completely alone.

What follows is a slow, unglamorous education. His first idea is that someone will come for him within a day or two, and that idea has to die before he can start living. He is tormented by mosquitoes, drinks lake water, and finds a bush of small "gut cherries" that he eats until he is violently sick. He finds raspberries and shares the patch with a bear that ignores him. He builds a shelter in a rock overhang. And in the middle of one night a porcupine wanders in; Brian throws the hatchet at it in the dark, misses, and takes a leg full of quills — but the hatchet hits stone and throws a shower of sparks. It takes him most of the next day, and a great deal of shredded birch bark, to turn that discovery into a fire he calls his friend and his guard.

Fire changes everything: it means smoke against the mosquitoes, cooked turtle eggs, and a signal. Then a search plane passes over the lake and does not see him. The despair that follows is the real low point of the novel — Brian cuts at himself with the hatchet and gives up for a night — and when he comes out of it he is different. Paulsen calls him the new Brian: someone who no longer measures the day in the hope of rescue, who notices everything, and who has understood that self-pity does not work. He builds a bow and arrows, learns to aim below where the fish appears to be, kills his first foolbird, and starts to put on the habits of a hunter.

Just as he becomes competent, the wilderness reminds him what it is. A moose attacks him in the shallows without provocation, driving him into the lake bottom and injuring his ribs and shoulder. That same night a tornado tears through the camp, scattering the fire, wrecking the shelter and undoing weeks of work — and, almost as an afterthought, dragging the tail of the sunken plane up out of the water where he can see it.

That detail is the last turn of the plot. Lying in his rebuilt shelter, Brian remembers the pilot mentioning a survival pack in the plane. He spends days lashing together a raft, paddles out, and hacks into the aluminium fuselage with the hatchet — which he drops, and has to recover in a long dive to the bottom of the lake. Inside the plane he finds the pack, and also the pilot's body, the face eaten away by fish. He is sick in the water, but he gets the pack to shore. The next morning it gives him a sleeping bag, a cookset, matches, a knife, freeze-dried food and a rifle he immediately dislikes, along with an emergency transmitter that appears to be broken. He switches it on anyway. While he is preparing his first real meal in fifty-four days, a plane drops out of the sky and lands on the lake.

Hatchet ends with a rescue that Brian causes by accident and barely notices at first.

In chapter 19 he opens the survival pack he has hauled out of the sunken plane and works through the contents: sleeping bag, foam pad, cookset, matches and lighters, knife, compass, first-aid kit, fishing kit, soap, freeze-dried meals, and a survival rifle that makes him feel oddly separated from the woods he has learned to live in. He also finds an emergency transmitter, turns it on, gets no sound or light from it, and concludes it was broken in the crash. It was not. It has been sending a signal the whole time.

He is about to cook the first easy meal he has had in almost two months when he hears an engine. A bush plane comes in low and lands on the lake. The pilot who climbs out is a fur buyer who was flying a mapping route, picked up the transmitter signal and diverted to find it — and who slowly realises that the thin, smoke-stained, silent boy in front of him is the missing child everyone stopped searching for. Brian's reply is the last line of the story proper: "My name is Brian Robeson. Would you like something to eat?"

The epilogue then steps back and reports what happened afterwards. Brian was in the wilderness for fifty-four days. He had lost around twenty percent of his body weight and stayed thin for years. There was a brief flurry of newspaper interest and then none. Some of the changes stuck permanently: he stayed observant in a way other people were not, he never again took food for granted, and he dreamed about the lake for years. Paulsen also notes what would have happened had he not been found — a northern winter would almost certainly have killed him, which is the premise Brian's Winter later explores.

And the Secret stays a secret. Brian goes home to a mother who does not know what he saw and a father who never finds out, and he decides not to tell. The survival plot resolves; the thing that was actually weighing on him in chapter one does not.

These are the lines readers most often take away from Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, quoted verbatim:

"He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work."

"Not hope that he would be rescued—that was gone. But hope in his knowledge. Hope in the fact that he could learn and survive and take care of himself. Tough hope, he thought that night. I am full of tough hope."

"He had to keep thinking of them because if he forgot them and did not think of them they might forget about him. And he had to keep hoping. He had to keep hoping."

"My name is Brian Robeson. Would you like something to eat?"

The last one is what Brian says to the pilot who has just landed to rescue him, and it is the closing line of the story before the epilogue.