Guts Read Online Free PDF Page B

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