Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books

In this chapter, Paulsen describes the weapons, skills, techniques, and scenarios that make for a good hunter. Unlike the nonlinear format of earlier chapters, this one tracks Paulsen’s progression from a young, untested rifle hunter to a small-game bow hunter and eventually to the big-game bow hunting that inspired the hunting scene in Hatchet.

Paulsen describes his first gun: a Remington single-shot .22 rifle; and his first kill: a duck shot from a ditch while it sat in the water. Paulsen writes, “It was all wrong, of course, and illegal, and very un-sporting. To use a rifle on a duck, to shoot it sitting. All wrong” (Guts: 68). This event acts as a specific starting point for Paulsen’s hunting journey, one that will evolve over the years such that he looks back on this first kill with distaste for his early ignorance.

Hunting soon becomes central to Paulsen’s life as a young man in northern Minnesota, and he spends every hour not in school deep in the woods or on the water. He makes a decent income selling rabbit, which he spends on food and clothing, and weapon parts.

Eventually Paulsen comes to dislike firearms because of the shattering sound that accompanies each discharge.