Guts Read online

  I knew only one thing. It was a terrible scream and it had come from one of my dogs. They were tethered back in some spruce trees, out of the wind, and at first I could see nothing but shaking limbs and flying snow. Then came more screams—mixed with growls, snarls and the snapping of teeth— and I moved through the snow unaware of the cold, though I was barefoot and my feet would suffer for days after. Now I could see into the trees. And there was a cow—four, five hundred pounds of cow, and she was intent on killing my dogs.

  I went insane. I didn’t have a weapon, but I grabbed the small ax I used for chopping up frozen meat and stormed in after the moose, screaming and cursing louder than the dogs, swinging like a madman, the ax slashing back and forth, and I think the noise startled her or confused her. Whatever the reason, she turned as if to attack me, stomped on one more dog, then vanished into the night.

  At first I thought she had killed two dogs and perhaps wounded two others. I gave what first aid I could, then ran to get dressed and harness up a team to carry the victims to the highway, where I could call a veterinarian from a pay phone.

  I was wrong. No dogs died, though one had a broken leg and another a cracked rib and both were out of the race for the season.

  After that incident I borrowed a rifle.

  Though I was attacked or had dangerous encounters many more times, none of my dogs ever got killed by moose, though I knew of other racers who lost dogs that way, either in training or during the race. But other dogs got injured in what I came to think of as passing attacks. They would develop in this way: We would be moving down a trail in the half-light and off to the side there would be a moose. This was a common occurrence. As a matter of fact, in a single training run lasting eight or ten hours it was usual to see eight or ten moose, always off to the side, always standing. Most of them would simply stand and stare as we went by. But on each run one or two would start trotting alongside the team.

  This still didn’t mean they were going to attack. But it brought my attention to an absolute peak, and since the moose were faster than the dogs, with legs that seemed to go on forever, they were very much in control.

  I learned to watch their backs. When the hair rose on their shoulders—not unlike the coat of an angry dog—it meant they were probably going to charge, and then I had to watch the head to see where the point of attack would be. If they aimed at the center of the team, the dogs would move out, there would be a scramble and we would get past, usually without much damage. If the moose aimed at the leaders I would yell at the dogs, turn them about and head back down the trail and away. This took some time and could end in possible injury to the dogs.

  Quite often the moose would not even look at the dogs but would swing its head to stare at the sled and its eyes would go red and I would scream at the dogs to hurry, and grab the ax tied to the sled and either dodge or fight my way out.

  Every dog run was interesting, many were frightening and on some I got injured. The worst attack, one I remembered when writing about Brian’s difficulties with moose, came in the dark and caught me completely by surprise.

  It was—and I’ve always wanted to use this phrase in a book—a dark and stormy night. Dark in the rest of the world means night but dark in the middle of a snowstorm in the bush of Alaska is very much, I think, what it would be like to be inside a cow.

  I could see almost nothing. Of course I was wearing a headlamp and had batteries to spare but I had found that the dogs (like cats) could see quite well in the dark and the light made strange shadows that caused them to trip and stumble. So we were running in the dark and had gone about forty miles and were moving through a particularly thick stretch of spruce trees and I kept hearing a rattle in the sled. I was carrying a metal Thermos full of hot tea and it was bouncing against something, making a noise that was beginning to irritate me, so, standing on the back of the sled, I reached forward and down to adjust the Thermos.

  At that precise moment a cow moose that had been standing in the darkened spruce trees swept me off the sled. I had no idea she was there, absolutely no warning that anything was coming, and the dogs hadn’t seen or smelled her, or if they had, they didn’t give any indication.

  Suddenly I was upside down in the snow, flat on my back, and something enormous was stomping on me. Without any doubt, she was trying to kill me. I had been attacked many times, in brushing, passing attacks, but this one wanted me dead.

  I quickly realized it was a moose, and as another dog driver had advised, I rolled into a ball and covered my head with my arms, presenting my back.

  She completely worked me over. I didn’t count the kicks and stomps but there were dozens. She stopped after a bit and I peeked at her, outlined against the snow, and she was staring at me, listening for my breath, and when at last I could hold it no longer and had to breathe again she heard it and renewed the attack.

  I don’t know how long she kept after me. It seemed hours, days. I lay as still as possible, trying to hide my breathing, but she kept coming back until I thought I was dead—and then she backed off. Thinking she was gone, I tried a small move, but she jumped me again. Finally I think she was convinced I was finished and she moved off into the forest.

  I was spitting blood. Later I found that I had a cracked rib and two broken back teeth.

  I had a gun—not on me, but on the sled. It was one of the few times I had brought a weapon on a run. A friend had loaned me a handgun, a .44 Magnum. The dogs had gone a hundred yards or so up the trail and stopped, tangled around a tree. I crawled, stumbled, fell to the sled and found the gun and turned and thought I would hunt her down, even if it took all my life. I wanted to kill her—six, seven times.

  I know she was an animal. And that we are supposedly superior to animals (though I doubt we are much superior.) I understand all that. I know we are supposed to temper judgment with wisdom and logic. But in all honesty if somebody came to me now as I was sitting at my computer and said they had found that moose and I would only have to walk seven or eight hundred miles to get her, I would grab a rifle and go for it.

  She made it personal, as the moose that went after Brian made it personal.

  CHAPTER 3

  THINGS THAT HURT

  He had come through the crash but the insects were not possible. He coughed them up, spat them out, sneezed them out, closed his eyes and kept brushing his face, slapping and crushing them by the dozens, by the hundreds.

  HATCHET

  I am living now on a sailboat in the Pacific Ocean and it is grand and beautiful and challenging and full of mystery and, sometimes, deadly. The woods where I hunted and trapped, camped and fished, grew and learned, are exactly the same. You can die out there. People die out there all the time—I have found their bodies and observed the damage done to them.

  We have grown away from knowledge, away from knowing what something is really like, toward knowing only what somebody else says it is like. There seems to be a desire to ignore the truth in favor of drama.

  Most people have heard of bear attacks, and we may know about moose attacks and wolf attacks (some rumors of which I believe are true, having seen wolves kill), but the truth is that more people are killed in North America by white-tailed deer and mule deer than by any other animal. Not just hurt, not just bruised or pushed or bumped, but killed. Most of them are killed in car accidents involving deer, but a goodly number are killed by direct attacks, especially in parks or other areas where wild deer have become used to people and beg for food. Many years ago I saw a small boy who couldn’t have been four years old killed by a white-tailed buck in a state park.

  It was not a petting zoo, but several half-tame deer would wander among the tourists, who fed them candy. It was early summer and a young buck—he had only a forked horn, still in velvet—had attached himself to the child and his mother. The child was eating those little white mints with the Xs across the surface. He gave one to the deer, and the buck took it gently enough and for some strange reason liked it. I was also young—a
bout fourteen—and though I had hunted and killed deer by then, I viewed this buck as cute and a pet and not something to hunt, not something wild. I didn’t understand when he stamped his feet in irritation if the child took too long to hand him another mint, didn’t understand that it was a warning.

  The deer ate four or five mints. The boy’s mother had a camera and had backed away to get a better shot.

  “Hold the candy away from him,” she told her child. “Make him reach for it so I can get a picture. . . .”

  The child took a mint from the package and held it out to the deer, which reached forward to take it; then the child pulled it back. The deer lashed out with his front hooves— two slashing jabs so fast, so incredibly fast, that the only thing I would see in my life to compete with it was a rattlesnake strike. I did not see motion. Just the boy standing there; then he was down and his chest and stomach were turning red where the buck’s hooves had stabbed him. There was nothing, not a thing that all the dozens of people standing around could do. The strike with razor-sharp hooves was so lethal that even now, looking back, it is hard to believe. The pointed ends of the hooves were like small spears; they were in and out and had killed the little boy before anybody could move.

  I can still see all this so clearly, and then there are only images: the mother with the camera half down, mouth open, eyes just beginning to show horror; the crowd of tourists, one man with popcorn halfway to his mouth, another lighting a cigarette, the match burning, glowing; all eyes on the deer, the small deer with blood on his hooves and forelegs, stamping his feet in anger, and finally the little boy, still and so small, lying on the gravel pathway, not terribly far from a sign that said Don’t Feed the Deer.

  Mosquitoes.

  Hatchet shows how Brian had to deal with mosquitoes, and many of the letters I have received ask if they can really be that bad.

  Of all the creatures on earth the mosquito is far and away the most deadly to man. Thousands of people die each year from many different strains of malaria or dengue fever. Whole populations have been wiped out by these two diseases—and they are both transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes.

  When you consider that only half of all mosquitoes bite—only the female feeds on blood—these numbers are even more remarkable. One female mosquito can infect and possibly kill several people by biting someone with malaria or dengue fever and then spreading the disease by biting others. The death rate over the years is simply staggering, and when you consider that the spread of these killers is kept in check only with the most strenuous effort, which is never fully successful, Brian’s plight becomes more understandable.

  Of course Brian was in the North, where there is no malaria and the mosquitoes tend not to spread disease, but the risks from infected bites are very real, and mosquitoes are more numerous in the North than they are in the Tropics. I have a theory that because the summers are so short, the northern mosquitoes are particularly vicious; they have very little time to hunt, feed, lay their eggs in water and repeat the cycle before the onset of winter, so the ones that attack efficiently and survive then reproduce their genes in the northern mosquito population.

  There are many stories of how bad these mosquitoes can be. I have heard of small animals—rabbits, raccoons, even coyotes and fawn deer—that died from loss of blood. I haven’t seen it personally but I believe the sources. I have seen workhorses so covered with mosquitoes that it was impossible to see the horse’s coat, and deer temporarily blinded by swarms of mosquitoes. One summer I saw a rabbit that seemed close to death, lying still on the ground, its ears packed full of mosquitoes. I have suffered mosquitoes much worse than did Brian in Hatchet.

  There was the incident in the sled dog kennel at our home in Minnesota. One summer night, I heard my dogs start barking. A bear had been bothering the dogs and had killed one of them, so I took a rifle and my headlamp and battery pack and ran out to the kennel in my underwear. At first I didn’t see the bear but I thought I heard it, and I went deeper into the kennel without thinking.

  The dogs were coated with repellent twice a week, so the mosquitoes didn’t bother them, but the insects were still drawn to the dogs’ exhaled breath—it is carbon dioxide that attracts them—and within seconds I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. I was standing in my underwear amid several dozen dogs on a warm summer night in the north woods, and to compound the error I was wearing a bright light on my head.

  I must have attracted every mosquito in the county. The cloud swarmed over me, filled my nostrils and my eyes, flooded my mouth when I breathed. They blinded me, choked me and, worst of all, tore into me like eight or nine thousand starving vampires. I don’t know how much blood I lost but I do know that when I regained the house—after a wild, blind run through two hundred yards of dark woods— there wasn’t a square inch on my body that hadn’t been bitten. I itched for a week.

  The same thing happened to Brian, every night, until he discovered that smoke from a smoldering fire keeps mosquitoes away. And if that had been all Brian had to cope with it would have been bad enough. Bear attacks, moose attacks, deer attacks and hordes of mosquitoes would be more than most people could handle.

  But in truth I was being kind to Brian. He didn’t have to face blackflies, which bite and drink blood; horseflies, which bite and take out chunks of flesh; deerflies, which eat meat; wood ticks, which drink blood; midges, gnats, fleas, ants, spiders, centipedes and bees or wasps (fatal if a person is allergic), and consider that all of these can be attacking all the time, and further add in the chance of infection . . .

  Survival in the woods almost seems impossible.

  I was canoeing once on a river in late summer with another man. We were working downstream on a wild river in northern Minnesota, setting off on a six-day run to lay out a trapline to work with in the fall and winter, and we came to a place where the sun was particularly hot and a large hatch of deerflies had developed.

  We had (I thought) adequate repellent and we kept going. But there seemed to be more flies and still more flies, biting right through the repellent, and I looked up and realized that they were so thick I could not see the man sitting at the other end of the canoe, just fourteen or so feet away. They went after my eyes and then his eyes, and I dimly made out that he was waving a paddle in the air, as if swatting them, and swearing and yelling, and I tried to do likewise, and we unbalanced the canoe and flipped it. All our gear went in the water with us. Foolishly, we had not tied our equipment into the canoe, so it fell out as we went over.

  I grabbed for my pack and held it—easy because I was in the rear and the pack was right in front of me. The guy in the front of the canoe could not reach around in time and his pack went to the bottom because he had filled it with canned goods. We never did find it, or the .22 single-shot rifle or our cooking gear or our cartridges. We set up a quick camp there onshore and dived into the muddy water, but there was a good current and even allowing for drift and working in search grids, searching downriver did no good. We lost all the gear except for matches and some potatoes in my pack, and in the next five days, working the rest of the way downriver, we got to apply a lot of the skills that Brian learned in Hatchet, such as spearing fish and making bows and willow arrows to shoot grouse.

  In the wilderness, it’s simply amazing how often a small thing can almost instantly snowball into a life-threatening disaster.

  At one time in my life I shot muzzle-loading rifles a great deal and went to many of the tournaments and shoots around the country. I never got into the reenacting thing that so many do—wearing buckskins and pretending to live the way they imagine the old mountain men lived—but when I started to write the Tucket Adventures series I researched that era, thinking that of all the people who live in an extreme manner the mountain men must have been the most radical. They’d head off with nothing but a horse and rifle and seemingly ride into legend. Jim Bridger, Kit Car-son—wild men and wild country.

  But my research revealed something else. There we
re quite a few men who thought they could head into the mountains and get rich from fur trapping. But most died in the first year. The big killer wasn’t bear attacks, or Indian attacks, or mountain-lion attacks— which I’m afraid most sources talk about. Those things sometimes happened, and I wrote about them in the Tucket Adventures, but most of the men died of malnutrition, or more specifically, dysentery brought on by malnutrition. Some studies indicate that as many as eighty percent of the so-called mountain men died in their first year in the wild, just from eating the wrong food or not knowing that they had to eat something other than meat.

  The point, and here is something I learned slowly and sometimes the hard way, is that it often seems that everything in the wilderness is conspiring to harm you in one way or the other, and this can lead to almost absurd occurrences. I know of a man who was killed by poison ivy—he had an allergic reaction to it while on a fishing trip and died in the boat while they were rushing him across a lake to a small town where there was a doctor.

  The solution to facing all these dangers, a solution that came very rapidly to me and to Brian, is knowledge. It can come from anywhere; from reading, from listening to people or from personal experience. However it comes, the knowledge must be there.

  CHAPTER 4

  KILLING TO LIVE: HUNTING AND FISHING WITH PRIMITIVE WEAPONS