Guts by Gary Paulsen

Author:Gary Paulsen [Paulsen, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307433473
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2007-12-17T13:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

EATING EYEBALLS AND GUTS OR STARVING: THE FINE ART OF WILDERNESS NUTRITION

He looked out across the lake and brought the egg to his mouth and closed his eyes and sucked and squeezed the egg at the same time and swallowed as fast as he could. . . . It had a greasy, almost oily taste, but it was still an egg.

HATCHET

There are two main drives in nature: to survive and to reproduce. But the primary drive is to survive, for reproduction cannot occur without survival. In most of nature, the most important element in survival is finding food.

I spent a lot of time in winter camps with dogs while I was training for and running the Iditarod, and I could have learned a whole life’s lesson by studying just one animal—not the dog, not the wolf, but one type of bird: the chickadee.

Chickadees are simply amazing. They do not migrate but stay north for the winter; at forty, fifty, even sixty below, they not only survive but seem to be happy, fluffed up to stay insulated and warm, and tough beyond belief. I would find frozen grouse; frozen deer standing dead, leaning against trees; frozen rabbits; and two times, even frozen men—all killed by nature, by cold, by starvation or by blatant stupidity.

(Imagine going cross-country skiing in the dead of winter in thick, old-growth forest and not even bringing a book of matches or a butane lighter; the poor fool broke his leg on a small hill and froze to death in the middle of enough fuel to heat a small city.)

But I never found a dead chickadee. They are like little feathered wolves, except more versatile.

I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point in my youth, in the wild, I decided that if it didn’t grow or live in the woods I didn’t want it. For a considerable time, in a very real way, I lived not unlike Brian in Hatchet. I would head into the woods with nothing but my bow and a dozen arrows—eight blunts and three or four broadheads—a small package of salt, some matches and little else.

When I first started to do this I found that luck had a large part to play in whether I ate, as it did with Brian. But as with Brian, two fundamentals had a great influence on my life. The first was the concept of learning. I went from simply walking through the woods, bulling my way until something moved for me to try a shot at, to trying to understand what I saw, and from that, to “feeling” what the woods were about: a sound here, a movement there, a line that looked out of place or curved the wrong way, a limb that moved against the wind at the wrong time or a smell that was wrong. And not just one of these things, not a single one but all of them mixed together, entered into my mind to make me a part of the

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