When sickness decimates his fishing village, an orphan named Leif flees north in a cedar canoe, journeying along a brutal but beautiful coastline.

While backpacking in the desert, thirteen-year-old Mark falls into a tube of blue light and is transported into a more primitive world, where he must use his knowledge and skills to survive.

"[In this biography, author Gary Paulsen portrays a series of life-altering moments from his turbulent childhood.] If not for his summer escape from a shockingly neglectful Chicago upbringing to a North Woods homestead at age five, there never would have been a Hatchet. Without the encouragement of the librarian who handed him his first book at age thirteen, he may never have become a reader. And without his desperate teenage enlistment in the Army,...

Two years after having survived a plane crash into the Canadian wilderness, a sixteen-year-old returns to the wild to befriend a wounded dog and hunt a rogue bear.

After having survived alone in the wilderness, Brian finds that he can no longer live in the city but must return to the place where he really belongs.