Hatchet (9781442403321) Read Online Free PDF

it seemed larger—flew from the top, real forest, and thereflection-bird matched it, both flying out over the water.
    Everything was green, so green it went into him. The forest was largely made up of pines and spruce, with stands of some low brush smeared here and there and thick grass and some other kind of very small brush all over. He couldn’t identify most of it—except the evergreens—and some leafy trees he thought might be aspen. He’d seen pictures of aspens in the mountains on tele-vision. The country around the lake was moderately hilly, but the hills were small—almost hummocks—and there were very few rocks except to his left. There lay a rocky ridge that stuck out overlooking the lake, about twenty feet high.
    If the plane had come down a little to the left it would have hit the rocks and never made the lake. He would have been smashed.
    Destroyed.
    The word came. I would have been destroyed and torn and smashed. Driven into the rocks and destroyed.
    Luck, he thought. I have luck, I had good luck there. But he knew that was wrong. If he had had good luck his parents wouldn’t have divorced because of the Secret and he wouldn’t have been flying with a pilot who had a heart attack and he wouldn’t be here where he had to have good luck to keep from being destroyed.
    If you keep walking back from good luck, he thought, you’ll come to bad luck.
    He shook his head again—wincing. Another thing not to think about.
    The rocky ridge was rounded and seemed to be of some kind of sandstone with bits of darker stone layered and stuck into it. Directly across the lake from it, at the inside corner of the L, was a mound of sticks and mud rising up out of the water a good eight or ten feet. At first Brian couldn’t place it but knew that he somehow knew what it was—had seen it in films. Then a small brown head popped to the surface of the water near the mound and began swimming off down the short leg of the L leaving a V of ripples behind and he remembered where he’d seen it. It was a beaver house, called a beaver lodge in a special he’d seen on the public channel.
    A fish jumped. Not a large fish, but it made a big splash near the beaver, and as if by a signal there were suddenly little splops all over the sides of the lake—along the shore—as fish began jumping. Hundreds of them, jumping and slapping the water. Brian watched them for a time, still in the half-daze, still not thinking well. The scenery was very pretty, he thought, and there were new things to look at, but it was all a green and blue blur and he was used to the gray and black of the city. Traffic, people talking, sounds all the time—the hum and whine of the city.
    Here, at first, it was silent, or he thought it was silent, but when he started to listen, really listen, heheard thousands of things. Hisses and blurks, small sounds, birds singing, hum of insects, splashes from the fish jumping—there was great noise here, but a noise he did not know, and the colors were new to him, and the colors and noise mixed in his mind to make a green-blue blur he could hear, hear as a hissing pulse-sound and he was still tired.
    So tired.
    So awfully tired, and standing had taken a lot of energy somehow, had drained him. He supposed he was still in some kind of shock from the crash and there was still the pain, the dizziness, the strange feeling.
    He found another tree, a tall pine with no branches until the top, and sat with his back against it looking down on the lake with the sun warming him, and in a few moments he scrunched down and was asleep again.

5
    His eyes snapped open, hammered open, and there were these things about himself that he knew, instantly.
    He was unbelievably, viciously thirsty. His mouth was dry and tasted foul and sticky. His lips were cracked and felt as if they were bleeding and if he did not drink some water soon he felt that he would wither up and die. Lots of