Hatchet · Garden Heights

Part 1

for Hatchet · Part 1 · Chapters 1–2

8 Parts40 min

What Happens in Part 1

Brian Robeson flies toward his father in Canada carrying a painful secret, until his pilot dies mid-flight and leaves him alone.

The flight northThirteen-year-old Brian Robeson rides in the cramped cockpit of a small single-engine Cessna bush plane, flying north over the endless Canadian wilderness to spend the summer with his father in the oil fields. He is a passenger in more ways than one, his mind circling back as the forest rolls beneath him.

The SecretHe calls it only the Secret: he saw his mother with another man, and he blames that betrayal for his parents' recent divorce. The hatchet she gave him as a parting gift rides awkwardly on his belt, a small, unwanted reminder of a love that now feels complicated.

The pilot diesThe quiet bush pilot lets Brian briefly hold the controls, and the boy feels the plane's strange, buzzing life in his hands. Then the pilot rubs his shoulder and belches, his face twisting; a massive heart attack stiffens his body, his foot kicks the rudder, and he is dead. Brian is utterly alone thousands of feet above trackless forest with a droning engine, a dead man beside him, and a radio he cannot use.

What We Will Learn

Section	What you will practice
Vocabulary	Survival & flight words: wilderness, altitude, cockpit, rudder, seep…
Literary Elements	Third-person limited view, ominous foreshadowing, and the flashback of the Secret
Cross-Curricular	Bush planes — how small aircraft open up remote country

Chapter Summary

Ch.	What happens
Chapter 1	Alone in the Air — Brian flies north in a bush plane toward his father, weighed down by the Secret and the divorce; the pilot lets him hold the controls, then begins to feel a strange pain.
Chapter 2	The Pilot Dies — the pilot suffers a fatal heart attack; Brian is left alone at the controls of a droning plane over the wilderness, forced to grab the wheel and think.

Part 1

Vocabulary

Study 10 key words from Chapters 1–2, then answer each question.

✈️Knowledge Bank · Flying into the Bush

Aviation & Geography · The Cessna and the NorthBrian’s journey begins in a bush plane — a small, rugged aircraft built to land on lakes, gravel bars, and rough clearings where there are no runways. Across the Canadian north, thousands of lakes and endless spruce forest stretch for hundreds of miles with almost no roads, so for many far-flung communities the bush plane is the only link to the outside world; pilots often fly low and navigate by reading the land itself — a river’s bend, a lake’s shape, a ridgeline. The single-engine Cessna Brian rides is typical of the type: one propeller, a cramped cockpit for a pilot and a passenger or two, and a panel of instruments that report altitude (height above the ground), heading, and fuel. This is the exact setting that makes his whole story possible — a land so vast and empty that one crash can strand a boy deep in the wilderness, farther from help than he could ever hope to walk.

An orange-and-white single-engine floatplane resting in a muddy tundra river channel beside a small open boat, with canvas tents and flat green tundra stretching behind — Photograph of a working bush plane — a Cessna of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — parked at a remote field camp on Alaska’s Yukon Delta, where the only other transport in sight is a boat. This is the breed of aircraft the *Knowledge Bank* describes: small, rugged, able to use a river or lake as its runway, and often the only link a far-flung camp has. One honest difference: this plane rides on floats, while the Cessna Brian boards has none — which is exactly why, in the next part, it cannot stay on the water. The plane in the photograph is real; Brian’s is Gary Paulsen (author)’s invention.
Cessna floatplane of the U.S. Department of the Interior at the Old Chevak field site, Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska; photograph by Donna Dewhurst, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Source: Wikimedia Commons, File:Cessna floatplane airplane aircraft.jpg, public domain.

wildernessn.Ch.1

Wild, empty land far from people

“The bush plane crossed hundreds of miles of wilderness.”

altituden.Ch.1

Height above the earth

“At that altitude the lakes looked like scattered coins.”

cockpitn.Ch.1

The space where a pilot sits and steers

“Brian was crammed into the small cockpit beside the pilot.”

throttlen.Ch.1

A lever that controls engine power

“He nudged the throttle and the engine roared louder.”

ruddern.Ch.2

A moving part that steers a plane or boat

“The dying pilot’s foot jammed against the rudder.”

dronen.Ch.1

A low, steady humming sound

“The engine’s drone filled every second of the flight.”

wincev.Ch.1

To flinch from sudden pain

“The pilot began to wince and rub his aching shoulder.”

instrumentn.Ch.2

A dial or gauge that gives information

“Brian stared at each instrument, understanding none of them.”

divorcen.Ch.1

The legal ending of a marriage

“The divorce had pulled his parents into separate homes.”

seepv.Ch.2

To flow slowly through small openings

“Cold fear began to seep into Brian’s chest.”

ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.

🧠Knowledge Bank question

1The Knowledge Bank explains that bush pilots often navigate across the wilderness by ___.Ch.1

2‘Altitude’ means how deep something lies underground.Ch.1

3The ‘cockpit’ is the place where the ___ sits.Ch.1

4A ‘drone’ is a sudden, sharp banging noise.Ch.1

5Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.2

Word choices:rudderthrottlewildernesscargo- some words will not be used

The pilot’s foot slipped and jammed the .

Brian pushed the to change the engine’s power.

6To ‘wince’ is to ___.Ch.1

7An ‘instrument’ on the panel is a ___.Ch.2

8To ‘seep’ is to ___.Ch.2

9Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.1

Word choices:divorcedronealtitudehatchet- some words will not be used

The steady of the engine never stopped.

His parents’ still weighed on his mind.

10The ‘throttle’ controls how much power the engine makes.Ch.1

Part 2

Comprehension

Show you understood what happens in Chapters 1–2.

💉Knowledge Bank · A Heart Attack at the Controls

Science · The Body Under AttackThe disaster that strands Brian is a heart attack — a sudden blockage of the blood supply to the heart muscle, usually by a clot in one of the coronary arteries. It brings crushing pain in the chest that spreads to the shoulder and left arm, shortness of breath, and a cold sweat — exactly the signs Brian watches the pilot show, rubbing his shoulder and grimacing, moments before he slumps forward. A heart attack can strike a healthy-looking adult without warning, and in the cramped cockpit of a bush plane there is no paramedic, no defibrillator, and no roadside to pull onto. That leaves Brian as the plane’s only conscious passenger — the rare, real emergency that aviation calls a ‘sole survivor’ situation, in which an untrained person must somehow keep a plane flying and bring it down. Nothing he does in these few minutes can restart the pilot’s heart. Grasping what is happening — and why it cannot be undone — is what turns his story from bad luck he might reverse into a sudden catastrophe he can only try to survive.

Visual AidHow a heart attack strands the plane

Sequence diagram of the medical chain the Knowledge Bank explains: a clot blocks a coronary artery, the heart muscle is starved of blood, the warning signs appear — crushing chest pain, pain down the arm, a cold sweat — and the pilot slumps. Four boxes compress minutes of physiology, and everything a hospital could do is left out on purpose, because in that cockpit none of it exists. The diagram shows what a heart attack is; it makes no claim that Brian could have recognized the signs in time, or changed anything if he had.

Myocardial infarction — mechanism and warning signs — as described by the American Heart Association and the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Drawn for Garden Heights Academy.

🧠Knowledge Bank question

1According to the Knowledge Bank, a heart attack happens when ___.Ch.1

2What kind of aircraft is Brian riding in?Ch.1

3Brian tells the pilot everything about the Secret during the flight.Ch.1

4The ‘Secret’ that haunts Brian is that ___.Ch.1

5Write the numbers 1–5 in the boxes to show the correct order of events. Number 1 = what happens first.Chapters 1–2

Brian is left alone at the controls of the plane.
Brian boards the bush plane to fly north.
The pilot rubs his shoulder and winces in pain.
The pilot suffers a heart attack and dies.
The pilot lets Brian briefly hold the controls.

6The pilot lets Brian hold the controls for a short time.Ch.1

7The gift Brian’s mother gave him for the trip is a ___.Ch.1

8What suddenly happens to the pilot in Chapter 2?Ch.2

9After the pilot dies, Brian knows exactly how to use the radio.Ch.2

10By the end of Part 1, Brian is ___.Ch.2

Part 3

Literary Elements

Understanding HOW and WHY Gary Paulsen (author) tells the story across Chapters 1–2.

✍️Knowledge Bank · Clues Planted Early: Foreshadowing

Literary Craft · Foreshadowing & MotifPaulsen loads these opening chapters with foreshadowing — small hints an author drops early to prepare the reader for what is coming. The pilot casually rubbing his shoulder, the belch and the wince, the single tool riding on Brian’s belt, the empty forest sliding past the window: each detail is quietly loaded with a meaning we feel only later. Woven through it all is a motif — an image or idea the author returns to on purpose — which Paulsen calls ‘the Secret’: Brian’s memory of his mother and the divorce, surfacing again and again like a wound that will not close. Notice how the writer keeps Brian’s outer journey (the flight, the crash) separate from his inner one (the Secret he carries), so the two can slowly braid together. Learning to spot foreshadowing and motif turns a plain adventure into a puzzle the careful reader helps solve — and rewards you when an early, easy-to-miss detail suddenly matters.

Third-person limited

The narrator says ‘he,’ yet we hear only Brian’s thoughts and see only what he sees.

Foreshadowing

The pilot’s rubbed shoulder and belching hint at the deadly heart attack to come.

Flashback

Brian’s mind jumps back to the Secret and the divorce, coloring the present with the past.

🧠Knowledge Bank question

1The Knowledge Bank explains that a motif is ___.Ch.1

2Fill in each blank with the correct literary term.Ch.1

Word choices:foreshadowingflashbacksettingrhyme- some words will not be used

The pilot’s aching shoulder is a piece of .

Brian’s memory of the Secret is a .

3Foreshadowing gives the reader early hints about what may happen later.Ch.1

4The pilot rubbing his shoulder mainly serves as ___.Ch.2

5When Brian’s mind jumps back to the Secret, Paulsen is using a ___.Ch.1

6In third-person limited, we can hear the private thoughts of every character.Ch.1

7Paulsen keeps the Secret returning during the flight to show that Brian’s ___ struggle is already underway.Ch.1

8Fill in each blank with the correct literary term.Ch.2

Word choices:third-person limitedforeshadowingnarratorclimax- some words will not be used

Seeing only Brian’s thoughts marks a view.

The pilot’s ache is quiet .

9A flashback shows an event from earlier than the current moment of the story.Ch.1

10The strongest clue that the pilot’s death is coming is his ___.Ch.2

Part 4

Think Deeper

Four deeper challenges — no single-word recall. Read, weigh the evidence, and reason it out.

🧠Knowledge Bank · Fight, Flight, or Freeze

Psychology · The Body’s AlarmWhen Brian grasps that he is alone above the wilderness, his body floods with the fight-or-flight response — a rush of adrenaline that speeds the heart, sharpens the senses, and readies a person to act in an emergency. Scientists add a third reaction the older name leaves out: freeze, when fear locks a person in place, unable to move or think. Across these chapters Brian swings among all three — panic that nearly paralyzes him, then flashes of cold, quick thinking that keep the plane level. Researchers who study survivors find that living through a crisis rarely depends on being fearless; it depends on managing fear — slowing the breath, narrowing attention to one small task at a time, refusing to surrender to panic. That is the quiet lesson buried under the whole novel, and the reason Brian’s story is really about the mind: courage is not the absence of terror but what a person chooses to do while afraid.

Picture the little plane as a loud, trembling box of glass and metal, crawling across a sky above a forest so wide it has no edge. Inside it a boy turns a secret over and over in his mind, half-hating his mother, half-missing her, the hatchet she gave him pressing against his hip. Beside him a quiet man flies the plane and, almost casually, rubs his shoulder and shifts in his seat — a small thing, easy to miss. Then the man’s face goes wrong, his body locks, and he is gone, and the boy is alone with a corpse and a machine he cannot control, thousands of feet above country that does not care whether he lives. Everything Brian relied on has been taken in a single minute.

Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.

1Claim: “Part 1 shows that Brian is dangerously unprepared for what is about to happen to him.” — choose the two details that best prove it.Claim & Evidence

2A warning sign of danger, or An ordinary detail of the trip? Tap each detail to sort it — tap again to switch sides. You can keep tapping to change your answer.Sort into two

◄ A warning sign of dangerAn ordinary detail of the trip ►

3Match each cause to its result. For each cause, pick its result.Cause & Effect

The pilot lets Brian hold the controls→

The pilot suffers a heart attack→

Brian cannot work the radio→

The Secret keeps returning to his mind→

🧠Knowledge Bank question

4Fill both blanks to complete the reasoning.Build the Argument

The Knowledge Bank argues that surviving a crisis rarely depends on being fearless because , which shows that .

Part 5

Standardized Test

Reading passage · Bush Planes and the Far North · SAT & TOEFL-style practice

The Bush Plane's Hard Duty

The little plane that carries Brian has a special job. It is a bush plane: a small, rugged aircraft built to fly into remote country far from paved runways and control towers. In much of northern Canada and Alaska there are no roads at all, only forest, muskeg, and thousands of lakes. For the oil crews, trappers, and doctors who work there, the bush plane is not a luxury but a lifeline, often the only practical way to reach places days of hiking away.

Bush planes are designed for exactly this hard duty. They are usually single-engine aircraft, light and strong, with a snug cockpit that seats only the pilot and a passenger or two, able to take off and land in surprisingly short distances. Many carry oversized tires for rough gravel bars, skis for snow, or pontoon floats so they can land directly on the countless northern lakes. A skilled pilot can set one down on water, a sandbar, or a clearing no ordinary plane could use. That flexibility is why one small aircraft matters to so many people.

That usefulness, however, comes with real risk. Bush flying often means long distances over empty country, changeable weather, and little or no help if something goes wrong. Pilots often fly alone at low altitude, a few hundred feet (30.5 m) above the trees, navigating by landmarks and experience as much as by instruments. If an engine fails or a pilot is incapacitated — as happens to Brian's pilot — there may be no second crew member, no nearby airport, and no quick rescue. The same aircraft that opens up the wilderness can, in one unlucky moment, strand a person deep inside it, hundreds of miles from the nearest human being.

Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.

1What is the main idea of the passage?SAT · Central Ideas

2A ‘bush plane’ is built to fly into ___.TOEFL · Factual Information

3In much of the far north there are no ___.SAT · Detail

4For northern workers, the bush plane is described as a ___.TOEFL · Factual Information

5Most bush planes have how many engines?SAT · Detail

6Floats are fitted to a bush plane so it can land on ___.TOEFL · Factual Information

7A major risk of bush flying is having ___ if something goes wrong.SAT · Inference

8In the passage, cockpit most nearly means ___.SAT · Words in Context

9In the passage, altitude most nearly means ___.TOEFL · Vocabulary

10Which event from Part 1 does this passage BEST help explain?SAT · Text Connections

Part 6 · Optional

Creative Writing

A bonus challenge to practice your English. Take your time and have fun with it.

About This Section

This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!

Writing Task — Part 1 “Suddenly on Your Own”

The pilot dies and Brian must handle a crisis with no adult to help. Write about a time you had to handle something difficult on your own, sooner than you expected. What happened, how did you feel, and what did you do first? 6–10 sentences. End with what the moment taught you about yourself.

You can start with: “I did not think I was ready, but there was no one else...”

0 / 40 words minimum

🗣 Teach It · Just for Fun (optional)

No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.

Part 1 Complete!

You finished Chapters 1–2 of Hatchet.

Here are your auto-graded results:

-

points out of 100

Teach it to someone

The best last step is to teach it. In your own words, explain what happened — retell a favorite scene, teach a character’s big choice, or sum up the main idea for a parent, friend, or classmate. When you can teach it clearly, you truly own it.

Move on to Part 2 →

Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Gary Paulsen. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Gary Paulsen’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.