BR 03 - Brian's Winter by Gary Paulsen

Author:Gary Paulsen [Paulsen, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult, Adventure, Survival, Middle Grades / Tween
ISBN: 9780440227199
Google: CoF1KNBYdRQC
Amazon: 0440227194
Barnesnoble: 0440227194
Goodreads: 141372
Publisher: Scholastic
Published: 1996-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter

NINE

He prepared for hunting by putting his hatchet and knife on his belt and one of the butane lighters in his pocket. He started to take the light bow but thought that he might see something big and want to take a shot and so took the war bow under the theory that he could shoot something small with the big bow but he couldn’t shoot a deer with the small bow. So he took the large bow and the new lance and five arrows with stone points and went hunting.

At the start he almost couldn’t hunt. The woods were so beautiful, so changed—it was a whole different world—that he walked slowly along and feasted his eyes on first one scene and then another. It should all be framed, he thought—framed in some way to take back.

Take back. He hadn’t thought that in a long while either. Pictures of home were fading. But if he could show this to his mother, he thought, just for her to see this . . .

He shook his head and almost at the same instant saw a rabbit. It was sitting under an overhanging evergreen limb, back in the shadow, but still very easy to see because it was brown. On its back there were several white spots, each about as large as a silver dollar. Brian had seen several rabbits with similar white spots and had thought they were some kind of fluke or mutation but he guessed now that they actually changed color in the winter and became white so that they wouldn’t be so visible.

Without it, Brian thought, they were dead meat. A week or so earlier he had walked through and seen one rabbit in this area. He now took twenty steps and saw seven, all at varying ranges, none close enough to shoot, all standing out like sore thumbs because they were brown against the white snow.

He moved easily, slowly, waiting for a close shot. When it came—a rabbit not more than twenty feet away—he shot carefully and only missed by a hair, actually cutting the fur along the top of the rabbit’s shoulders. The rabbit dodged left, then right, and vanished in the underbrush and Brian went forward to get his arrow.

At first he couldn’t find it. He’d seen it fly, had seen exactly where it went into the snow—there was a hole marking the arrow’s entry—but it wasn’t there. He dug in the snow but still couldn’t find it and didn’t find it until he’d stepped back and lined up the flight of the arrow and worked along the snow scooping it out every foot. The arrow had gone more than thirty feet after entering the snow, skittering along beneath the surface before coming to rest. He’d have to be careful of his shots, he thought, pulling it out and blowing the snow off the feathers—he’d lose all his arrows on one hunt.

He moved on, still taken by the beauty, and had three more shots, all of

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