Guts Read Online Free PDF Page A

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