In the thirty to forty thousand letters a year that come asking about Hatchet there are many diversities—questions about Brian, how his life is getting on, how he likes high school, is he old enough now to get married, have children; some readers have even done videos depicting different aspects of Brian’s life, and more than once media has asked where he lives so he could be interviewed for magazines or papers.
But there is one thread that permeates nearly all the letters.
Almost without exception there is an overwhelming desire to know how it all started, where Hatchet began.
It is a simple question, but like so many simple questions it has a complex answer. The knowledge that went into writing Hatchet came from my life, and the forces that shaped and guided that life started not in the woods but in the throes of alcoholism.
I was one of the wasted ones.
The ones who turned away.
It was before foster homes or attempts to understand and help children from “problem” families; before machinery existed to catch young people who fell through the cracks, dropped by the wayside, were lost in the mist, and all those other cliches that are applied to familial casualties—the young walking wounded of the society. I was one of them, one of the emotionally injured, who awakened crying in the night, the boys who saw with wide eyes and could say nothing.
In those days, there were no programs to help, no government agencies, but the problems were still there; the abuse and alcohol and emotional strain and pain—all existed then and before then, except that when a young person had trouble, there wasn’t any way to fix it. The young would either have to stand and take it, which many did, to great and lasting harm, or they could cut and run.
I ran to the woods and rivers of northern Minnesota.
It was, I suppose, a kind of self-fostering—perhaps a subconscious seeking of help from nature—although we did not think of it in those terms. It was simpler. In the normal run of things our lives hurt. When we were in the woods or fishing on the rivers and lakes our lives didn’t hurt. We did what didn’t hurt, and as it didn’t hurt more and more, we spent more and more time in the woods and on the rivers—a natural flow of survival.
It also, in a very direct way, led to the novel Hatchet for it was there, on the soft winding rivers and quiet blue lakes, in the quick splash of fall color, the hiss of line going off a reel, the soft crack of an old .22 rifle sighted on grouse (fool hen), the shaking hands that aimed at first deer with a straight bow and homemade arrows—it was there that Hatchet was born.