Guts by Gary Paulsen Page A

the sound of the rotors—which was very good time, though much too late for this man— and I kept working on him though I knew he was dead and I had seen him die, seen him move from his life into his death, and though I had seen death many times before, I had not seen it in this way. Not in the way his eyes had looked into mine while the life left him.
    Years later, when I came to write
Hatchet
and the scene where the pilot is dying, I remembered this man of all the men I saw dead from heart attacks and car wrecks and farm accidents. I remembered him and his eyes and I put him in the plane next to Brian because he was, above all things, real, and I wanted the book to be real. But I did not sleep well that night when I wrote him into the book and I will not sleep well tonight thinking of his eyes.
    In some strange warp of fate I was to witness an airplane crash, or its immediate after-math, almost exactly one week after that man died. This would also go into
Hatchet.
    Few people realize that the land rises southeast of Denver, just as it does to the west, where the Rockies lie. Grass hills slope gently upward, slightly higher than the Denver airport, for fifty or sixty miles, then taper off into the prairies of Kansas.
    One pilot did not check his charts and took off from Denver at a low altitude, thinking that the ground would fall away gently below him. He hit the top six feet of a dirt ridge at 180 knots cruising speed. I was on the scene within four hours of the crash and the only recognizable item was the engine, a crumpled ball of steel and oil stains.
    Everything else—the three passengers, who couldn’t have known what hit them, the seats, the wings, the fuselage, everything— was torn and flattened and shattered. The bodies simply did not exist, not even as bits of pieces, and the investigative team finally gave up trying to make any sense from the crash. The debris, mechanical and human, extended from the ridge where the plane had first struck, spreading out in an oval a hundred yards wide and a quarter mile long. Most of the wreckage was in quarter- or half-dollar-sized pieces. Had the pilot flown a mere six feet higher, he would have been safe. Instead, the image of the destruction that resulted from a full-speed collision with the ground came back to me when I later wrote the scene in
Hatchet.
    I had seen other plane wrecks. I saw fighters crash when I was in the military—spectacular crashes, sometimes with the pilot dying, though more often ejecting safely— but those were extreme events with extreme machines and the dynamics would not necessarily apply here. Jet fighters at work, training or fighting, are always, always pushing their performance envelope, as are the pilots—they must be that way to stay alive in combat.
    In 1946, when I was seven years old and on a ship headed to the Philippines, I saw a passenger plane ditch in the Pacific. It was a C-54, a four-engine propeller-driven plane used for carrying freight and passengers during the Second World War. It was usually very reliable, but in this case there was some problem that affected all four engines and they had to ditch. The captain of our ship stopped in midocean, and the C-54 circled until the pilot could bring the plane in as close as possible to the ship. The ocean was nearly flat, or seemed so, but the plane appeared to skip when it first hit; then it moved slightly sideways in the air, then hit again and broke in two about two thirds of the way back to the tail. We were close enough to see people spilling out into the water, and when the plane settled down and stopped, more people emerged from the doors and onto the wing. They were all women and children— later we learned that they had been on their way to see their husbands and fathers—and at this point the loss of life was not so terrible. Even those thrown clear had life jackets on and were moving in the water, and the lifeboats from the ship were