El Hacha

The roar of the single-engine Cessna is a thundering wall of sound, sealing thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson inside his own head. Below, the endless green of the Canadian wilderness flows to the horizon, a sea of trees dotted with lakes. Inside, there are only the ugly, tearing words: Divorce. The Secret. He can still see it - his mother in the strange station wagon, kissing the man with the short blond hair. The thought burns his eyes, but he doesn't cry. Not anymore. The pilot, a man in his forties, notices his gaze and smiles, offering him a turn at the controls. For a moment, the vibration of the plane, alive in his hands, pushes the Secret away. But then the pilot takes the wheel back, rubbing his left shoulder, a sudden smell of body gas filling the small cockpit.

A spasm of pain drives the pilot back into his seat. “Chest! Oh God, my chest is coming apart!” Brian knows, then. It's a heart attack. He watches, frozen, as the pilot slams back one last, awful time. His leg jerks, pulling the plane into a sideways slew, and then there is only the drone of the engine and a terrifying silence from the man beside him. He is alone. For a long time, he can do nothing but stare as the plane flies on without a pilot. Finally, a desperate thought cuts through the horror: he has to fly the plane. He wrestles with the controls, his stomach lurching with every clumsy movement. He finds the radio, gets the headset on, and screams for help into the microphone. A faint voice answers, breaking through the static, but the signal is lost before he can explain where he is. He doesn't even know. He is simply a boy in a small cell, hurtling through the sky until the fuel runs out.

When the engine coughs and dies, the silence is absolute. He pushes the nose down, aiming for a distant L-shaped lake, his mind screaming, *Gonna die*. Trees fill the windshield, a blur of green death, then a great wrenching sound as the wings are torn away. The plane smashes into the lake, water exploding through the cockpit, pulling him down into a cold, blue-green world. He claws at his seatbelt, rips himself free through the shattered window, and fights his way toward the light, his lungs burning, until his head breaks the surface and he pulls himself onto the shore, where everything goes black.

He awakens to a world of pain and swarming insects. His forehead is a swollen mound, his body is a map of aches, and clouds of mosquitos and black flies descend, making a living coat on his skin. He is dirty, starving, bitten, and so completely miserable that he can only sit and cry. The first days are a blur of mistakes. He eats a handful of tart, red berries - gut cherries, he calls them - and is wracked with violent sickness all night. He builds a crude shelter under a rock overhang, only to be visited in the dark by a porcupine that leaves his leg full of quills. Lying in the dark, pulling them out one by one, he thinks he can't take it anymore. But when the crying is done, nothing has changed. Self-pity, he learns, accomplishes nothing.

A dream of his father and his friend Terry leads him to a discovery. When he threw his hatchet at the porcupine, it struck the rock wall and showered sparks. Fire. The thought ignites a new hope. For hours he works, striking the hatchet against a dark stone, trying to catch a spark in a nest of fine birchbark peelings. Finally, after countless failed attempts, a tiny spark catches, glows, and with his gentle breath, bursts into flame. “I have a friend,” he thinks, watching the flames dance. “A friend and a guard.” The fire keeps the insects at bay and gives him the courage to face the night.

He is not the same boy who crashed. His body grows lean and tough, his skin browned by the sun. His mind changes, too; his senses sharpen until he can see the shape of a foolbird hiding in the brush and hear the whisper of a wolf's passage. He learns from his mistakes. He fashions a bow and arrow, and after many failures, learns to account for the refraction of water to spear the fish that swarm in the shallows. He feels a swelling pride when he eats his First Meat - a foolbird roasted over his fire, its taste finer than any food he has ever known. He builds a sturdy shelter, a food shelf high on the rocks, and a pen to store live fish. He is full of a new, tough hope - not that he will be rescued, but that he can learn, and survive, and take care of himself.

Just as he feels he has mastered his world, the wilderness reminds him of its brutal power. A moose attacks him without reason, a wall of brown fur that gores his ribs and nearly drowns him in the shallows. He drags his battered body back to his shelter, only to hear a low roar approaching, like a freight train. A tornado tears through the camp, ripping his shelter apart, scattering his tools, and sucking his fire from the earth. In an instant, he is back to nothing, with only the hatchet at his belt. But he is not broken. “Is that the best you can do?” he thinks, baring his teeth in the dark. “That won't get the job done.”

The storm, however, has given him a gift. The tornado has churned the lake, lifting the tail of the sunken Cessna out of the water. Inside, he knows, is the survival pack. After a day of painstaking work building a raft, he pushes it out to the wreck. He drops his hatchet into the murky depths and has to make a terrifying, lung-bursting dive to retrieve it. Hacking his way into the fuselage, he confronts the gruesome, fish-eaten remains of the pilot before freeing the pack. Exhausted, he drags the heavy bag to shore, a treasure trove of knives, matches, a sleeping bag, and freeze-dried food packets.

He lays out his riches, marveling at the incredible wealth. There is even a survival rifle and an emergency transmitter, which he flicks on and off, thinking it broken. As he prepares a feast, a beef and potato dinner simmering over a fire he started with a butane lighter, he feels a strange sense of disconnect. The rifle and the lighter remove him from the world he has come to know so intimately. He is lost in the rich smell of cooking food, a smell from his old life, when the sky above him explodes with the roar of an engine.

A bushplane with floats passes low overhead, tips its wings, and glides to a perfect landing on the lake. The pilot hops onto the sand, staring at the ragged, lean boy who stands before him. “I heard your emergency transmitter,” the pilot says, his voice trailing off. “You're him, aren't you? That kid… they quit looking for you months ago.” Brian stands silently, the pot of orange drink still in his hand. He looks at the pilot, at the plane, and at the life he has built. He clears his throat. “My name is Brian Robeson,” he says. Then, gesturing toward the simmering pot, he adds, “Would you like something to eat?”