Hatchet: Chapter 17–Epilogue

The flames cut the cool damp morning, crackled and did much to bring his spirits up, not to mention chasing away the incessant mosquitos.

Much of the wood from his original wall was still nearby and up in back of the ridge he actually found a major section of the weave still intact.

Tomorrow he would find food and refine the camp and bring things back to sanity from the one completely insane day.

Somehow he would have to get into die tail, inside the plane — rip or cut his way in — and however he did it he would need an operating base of some kind. A raft. Which, he found ruefully, was much easier said than done.

And for a moment he was stymied.

He could visualize more easily his mother doing things than his father because he had never been to where his father lived now.

Only a short piece of the top of the fuselage, the plane’s body toward the tail, was out of the water, just a curve of aluminum, and at first he could see no place to tie the raft.

Three more hacks and he had a triangular hole the size of his hand and he could see four cables that he guessed were the control cables going back to the tail and he hit the skin of the plane with a frenzied series of hacks to make a still larger opening and he was bending a piece of aluminum away from two aluminum braces of some kind when he dropped the hatchet.

This time he made an arrow out of his arms and used his legs to push off the bottom of the raft, all he had in his legs, to spring-snap and propel him down.

There were some small pieces and bits of paper floating on the surface inside the plane — dirt from the floor of the plane that had floated up — but nothing substantial.

It was instinctive, fear more than anything else, fear of what he had seen.

With the added weight of the bag — which seemed to get heavier by the foot — coupled with the fact that he was getting weaker all the time, the raft seemed barely to move.

All day in the water had tired him so much that, in the end, he had fallen asleep sitting against his shelter wall, oblivious even to the mosquitos, to the night, to anything.

During that time he had lost seventeen percent of his body weight. He later gained back six percent, but had virtually no body fat — his body had consumed all extra weight and he would remain lean and wiry for several years.

For a brief time the press made much of Brian and he was interviewed for several networks but the furor died within a few months.