Brian's Return by Gary Paulsen Page A

taking bass for sport or money in huge contests with fancy boats and electronic gear that located each fish individually.
    Sport, they called it. But they weren’t hunting or fishing because they needed to; they were killing to kill, not eat, to prove some kind of worth, and he stopped reading the magazines and watching the videos. His survival in the wilderness had made him famous, in a small way, and some of the magazines interviewed him, as did some of the hunting and sporting shows on television, but they got it all wrong. Completely wrong.
    “Boy conquers savage wilderness!” some magazines said in the blurbs on the covers. “Learns to beat nature . . .”
    It wasn’t that way. Had never been that way. Brian hadn’t conquered anything. Nature had whipped him, not the other way around; had beaten him down and pounded the stupidity out of his brain until he had been forced to bend, forced to give, forced to learn to survive. He had learned the most important fact of all, and the one that is so hard for many to understand or believe: Man proposes, nature disposes. He hadn’t conquered nature at all—he had become part of it. And it had become part of him, maybe
all
of him.
    And that, he thought as the canoe slid gently forward, had been
exactly
the problem.

Chapter Two
    If he had to name the final straw that had done it, that had driven him away, driven him back, it would, he thought, have had to be the noise . . .
    Another stroke of the paddle and the canoe slithered along the water. It was a beautiful canoe, named
The Raft
—made of Kevlar, sixteen feet long and weighing only fifty-two pounds empty, as smooth as fish skin. It seemed to fit nature as well as wind or water, seemed almost alive.
    He had tried. He had tried as hard as he could to fit in, to become normal again. After the fame wore off, the novelty of telling people what had happened, showing them how he’d made the first fire, how to make a bow, how to hunt—when all that was done and the world around him had returned to a semblance of normalcy—he’d tried to fit back in. For a year and more he had acted—in his mind anyway—as if he were normal.
    School. He’d gone back to school and tried to become reacquainted with old friends. They were still friends, glad to welcome him back into their company. The problem wasn’t them, it was him.
    “Let’s go down to the mall and play some video games,” they would say. Or play softball, or ride bicycles or, or, or. And he would try. But sports and shooting electronic bullets or rays at imaginary enemies that clomped across screens seemed silly, pale in comparison to what his real life had been like: having moose attack him, living on the edge of starving, living only because his thinking, his brain, kept him alive. He couldn’t get into the games, couldn’t believe in them. It was the same with the people who made up extreme sports just to prove they could do it. Rock climbers, “radical” skateboarders, wilderness programs that were supposed to toughen up city kids—rich kids—and make them better people. All games.
    He drifted away. Talking about which girl liked which boy or who was cool and who was not or who would be at what party or who was or who was not doing drugs—all of it became a swirl around him. He heard the sounds, nodded, tried to appear interested, but in the end, sitting alone in his room one evening, he realized that he couldn’t care less about any of it.
    He sought solitude. Even when he was in a group, nodding and smiling and talking, he was alone in his mind. Sometimes his thinking would catch up with the reality of what was happening and he would see himself talking as if in the third person. Here is Brian, he would think, telling Bill that he can’t go to the movie tonight because . . .
    Reality began to slip away from him. Not that he was mentally different, or mentally ill, so much as that it just bored him. There was a small park in town, a stand of trees with