Hatchet — Chapter 9

About This Passage

This passage sits at the hinge of the chapter: Brian has just made fire, but the flames are already racing to consume their fuel. Paulsen chooses the simile "as if it were gasoline" — a deliberate intrusion of modern combustion language into a wilderness scene — to tell readers that success has created a new problem of supply. The word "gratified" carries unusual weight here because Brian is finally acknowledging, in a precise emotional vocabulary, that the effort has paid.

Narration Prompt

Retell chapter nine in your own words. Begin with Brian's failed experiments with grass and twigs and his verdict 'So close, so close.' Move to his discovery of the birches ('Paper.') and the two hours of painstaking shredding. Trace his reasoning: ripping the twenty-dollar bill, the thought of the Cro-Magnon man, the recovered school lesson about fuel and oxygen. Show the two-stage breath experiment — too hard, then gently — and the 'glowing red worms' that become flame. Finish with Brian's rhetorical leap to 'friend and guard' and the unbidden return of thoughts about his mother and father.

Discussion Questions

1. Paulsen stages Brian's failures in a specific sequence: grass, twigs, a twenty-dollar bill, and finally birch bark. What does the twenty-dollar bill contribute to this sequence that the other three materials do not? What is Paulsen revealing about how Brian's relationship to the old world is changing?
2. Brian thinks 'a cave dweller would have had a fire by now, a Cro-Magnon man would have a fire by now—but I don't know this.' This is a thought about inherited human knowledge. How does this thought both accuse and liberate Brian? What does it push him to try next?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide