Guts by Gary Paulsen Page B

already lowered and on their way to pick up survivors.
    But the ship was very slow—barely making seven knots—and full of people, and hence full of food garbage from the galley that was collected and then thrown off the stern each day. Sharks, dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds of them, were following the ship to eat the trash, and as soon as the plane hit the water the sharks made for the wreckage. The plane sank almost immediately, and in the minutes it took for the boats to reach the people, the sharks tore into them. It was as bad as anything I have ever seen. At times the sailors had to beat the sharks off and pull the people out of their mouths in a kind of horrible tug-of-war.
    Later, when I was writing, I remembered the way the plane broke in two on the seemingly flat and still water; it was as if the plane had hit a brick surface instead of liquid. Research showed me that while large passenger planes almost always break in half on impact with water (depending on the height of the waves), single-engine or smaller planes almost never do. But I remembered the solidity of that impact when I came to write of Brian crashing the Cessna and the way the water might look soft but act like concrete.
    Although I have never crashed in a Cessna 406 (and I hope I never do), I nearly crashed in one and have been in a forced landing in another, and both times it seemed I would certainly die.
    Both incidents occurred in Alaska in the winter after I ran my second Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. After running the first I had written the novel
Dogsong
, which brought me some recognition. I was touring the state, talking in villages about writing and running dogs and flying from village to village in a Cessna 406 bushplane.
    The pilot seemed very young, but then I was getting to an age when a lot of people seemed young, and he was very competent, and he did the preflight checks well, and though we were usually the only two on the plane, he always repeated his lecture about safety belts, the location of emergency gear and fire extinguishers and how to evacuate the plane. It was winter and we were heading to a village in the interior well north of Fairbanks. It was very cold—perhaps fifty below—and I had stupidly not brought parkas or proper winter clothing because in two days I was due to fly out of Anchorage back to the lower forty-eight. We were cruising at approximately three thousand feet over winter-clad forest. Now and then I could see a moose, once I thought I saw a wolf, and I was just musing about how much I truly loved the woods, the wildness of it, when the engine stopped.
    It did not stop dead. Our forward progress kept the propeller turning, windmilling, but it was clear that the engine was no longer firing and we had gone dead-stick: no engines, no controls. The pilot immediately put the plane into a glide to keep up airspeed.
    The world suddenly changed—and it was a sensation I would remember when I wrote
Hatchet.
With the dying of the engine every aspect of our flight drastically altered. No longer was the forest sliding by beneath us wonderful scenery; it had become a place that would try to wreck the plane, try to freeze us, try to starve us, try to end us. I had spent a lot of time in the bush but it was always at my own behest, when I wanted to be there and in the condition I wanted to be in. Now I was falling, and falling fast, toward a wilderness I was unprepared to deal with; I had the wrong clothes, no weapon, no survival gear except for a sleeping bag and the plane’s emergency kit. In a very real way, I had become the Brian Robeson I would soon write about.
    The pilot was busy, trying to restart the engine, working to raise somebody on the radio, reviewing emergency procedures (pull the seat belt tight, protect your face), keeping the right glide angle to hold the plane in the air as long as possible and yet maintain flying speed, and all the while trying to locate a place suitable for an