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Brian's Return Paperback – May 8, 2001

by Gary Paulsen (Author)

4.7 2,688 ratings

Book 4 of 5: Brian's Saga

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As millions of readers of Hatchet, The River, and Brian's Winter know, Brian Robeson survived alone in the wilderness by finding solutions to extraordinary challenges. But now that's he's back in civilization, he can't find a way to make sense of high school life. He feels disconnected, more isolated than he did alone in the North. The only answer is to return-to "go back in"-for only in the wilderness can Brian discover his true path in life, and where he belongs.

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As millions of readers of Hatchet, The River, and Brian's Winter know, Brian Robeson survived alone in the wilderness by finding solutions to extraordinary challenges. But now that's he's back in civilization, he can't find a way to make sense of high school life. He feels disconnected, more isolated than he did alone in the North. The only answer is to return-to "go back in"-for only in the wilderness can Brian discover his true path in life, and where he belongs.

About the Author

Among Gary Paulsen’s best-known titles are Brian’s Winter and Soldier’s Heart. This novel is based on his own life.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Brian sat quietly, taken by a peace he had not known for a long time, and let the canoe drift forward along the lily pads. To his right was the shoreline of a small lake he had flown into an hour earlier. Around him was the lake itself, an almost circular body of water of approximately eighty acres surrounded by northern forest—pine, spruce, poplar and birch—and thick brush.

It was late spring—June 3, to be exact—and the lake was teeming, crawling, buzzing and flying with life. Mosquitos and flies filled the air, swarming on him, and he smiled now, remembering his first horror at the small blood drinkers. In the middle of the canoe he had an old coffee can with some kindling inside it, and a bit of birchbark, and he lit them and dropped a handful of green poplar leaves on the tiny fire. Soon smoke billowed out and drifted back and forth across the canoe and the insects left him. He had repellant with him this time—along with nearly two hundred pounds of other gear—but he hated the smell of it and found it didn't work as well as a touch of smoke now and then. The blackflies and deerflies and horseflies ignored repellant completely—he swore they seemed to lick it off—but they hated the smoke and stayed well off the canoe.

The relief gave him time to see the rest of the activity on the lake. He remained still, watching, listening.

To his left rear he heard a beaver slap the water with its tail and dive—a warning at the intruder, at the strange smoking log holding the person. Brian smiled. He had come to know beaver for what they truly were—engineers, family-oriented home builders. He'd read that most of the cities in Europe were founded by beaver. That beaver had first felled the trees along the rivers and dammed them up. The rising water killed more trees and when the food was gone and the beaver had no more bark to chew they left. The dams eventually broke apart, and the water drained and left large clearings along the rivers where the beaver had cut down all the trees. Early man came along and started cities where the clearings lay. Cities like London and Paris were founded and settled first by beaver.

In front and to the right he heard the heavier footsteps of a deer moving through the hazel brush. Probably a buck because he heard no smaller footsteps of a fawn. A buck with its antlers in velvet, more than likely, moving away from the smell of smoke from the canoe.

A frog jumped from a lily pad six feet away and had barely entered the water when a northern pike took it with a slashing strike that tore the surface of the lake and flipped lily pads over to show their pale undersides.

Somewhere a hawk screeeeeennned, and he looked for it but could not see it through the leaves of the trees around the lake. It would be hunting. Bringing home mice for a nest full of young. Looking for something to kill.

No, Brian thought—not in that way. The hawk did not hunt to kill. It hunted to eat. Of course it had to kill to eat—along with all other carnivorous animals—but the killing was the means to bring food, not the end. Only man hunted for sport, or for trophies.

It is the same with me as with the hawk, Brian felt. He turned the paddle edgeways, eased it forward silently and pulled back with an even stroke. I will kill to eat, or to defend myself. But for no other reason.

In the past two years, except for the time with Derek on the river, in a kind of lonely agony he had tried to find things to read or watch that brought the woods to him. He missed the forest, the lakes, the wild as he thought of it, so much that at times he could not bear it. The guns-and-hunting magazines, the hunting and fishing videos on television sickened him. Men using high-velocity weapons to shoot deer or elk from so far away they could barely see them, or worse, blasting them from a blind or the back of a Jeep; baiting bear with pits full of rotten meat and shooting them with rifles that could stop a car; 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 some hedges, and he found himself going there more and more, walking past the park on his way home from school, stopping under the trees, closing his eyes, remembering the woods, the wind, the movement of leaves, the world without the incessant noise.

Not just cars and horns and sirens and television, which he had come to hate because it took so much away from his thinking, but people talking and planes flying over, doors slamming—it all rolled into one kind of static sound, one noise.

It came to a head in of all places the front entryway of Mackey's Pizza Den. Brian had become aloof, sometimes unaware of the social life around him, and without knowing it had upset a boy named Carl Lammers. Carl was a football player, a large boy—his nickname was Hulk—and also a bully who envied Brian's celebrity. Brian didn't know him. Apparently Carl thought Brian had said something bad about him and he was coming out of Mackey's Pizza Den just as Brian was walking in with a boy and girl from school. The boy was small and thin—he was named Haley—and the girl was named Susan and she thought Brian was great and wanted to know him better and had invited him for a pizza so she could talk to him. Haley had been standing nearby and thought the invitation included him, to Susan's disappointment.

Carl had asked Susan on a date once and she had refused him. Seeing her with Brian made his anger that much worse.

He saw Brian through the glass of the door, saw him walking with Susan, and Carl threw his whole weight into his shoulder and slammed the door open, trying to knock Brian off balance.

It all went wrong. Brian was too far to the side and the door missed him. It caught Haley full on, smashing his nose—blood poured out immediately—and slammed him back into Susan. The two of them went flying backward and Susan fell to the ground beneath Haley and twisted her kneecap.

"Oh . . . ," she moaned.

For a moment everything seemed to hang...

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Laurel Leaf; Reprint edition (May 8, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0440413796
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0440413790
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 9 - 13 years, from customers
Grade level ‏ : ‎ 7 - 6
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.25 x 0.5 x 6.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,664,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13,392 in Teen & Young Adult Action & Adventure
- #44,688 in Children's Action & Adventure Books (Books)
- #75,488 in Children's Literature (Books)

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4.7 2,688 ratings

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Gary Paulsen

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Gary Paulsen is one of the most honored writers of contemporary literature for young readers. He has written more than one hundred book for adults and young readers, and is the author of three Newberry Honor titles: Dogsong, Hatchet, and The Winter Room. He divides his time among Alaska, New Mexico, Minnesota, and the Pacific.

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gt surber

Outstanding woods lore ands life lessons

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2016

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Review - The Brain Sagas by Gary Paulsen

I have now finished all five of the Brian Sage books - “Hatchet,” “The River,” “Brian’s Winter,” “Brian's Return” and “The Hunt.” and the epilogue “Guts” by Gary Paulsen. “The Hatchet” is one of three Newberry Awards that Gary Paulsen has earned.

Basically the series is one story. The story of an teenage boy who at age 13 is left alone in the North Woods of Canada due to a pilot’s fatal heart attack and plane wreck. The first book, “The Hatchet” tells of the guts, intelligence, patience and luck of a 13 year old boy with little wilderness experience in learning how to live and survive in a remote wilderness. We get a marvelous set of instructions in wilderness lore and living, and a glimpse into an intelligent mind that problem solves, learns and masters a strange world. At the end of this book Brian retrieves a signal radio from the submerged plane and is rescued.

In “Brian’s Winter” is an alternate ending. Brian is not rescued, but manages to learn more and survive into December. We see more of Brian’s talents and abilities and new found skills. Here, Brian stumbles into a family of Cree Native Americans manning a trap line, who take him in. Brian flies out on the next supply place. The Cree family consider him like one of the “old people” for Brian is dressed in skins he has captured and his arrows have stone points he has made himself. Yes, some of the story is very fortuitous for Brian, but that does not distract from the lessons of the wilderness and the lessons of life Brian has to learn to survive.

“The River” is a book with Brian returning to the North Woods with a psychologist, Derek, of the military attempting to learn how to teach survival to the military. The man is not schooled in the wilderness at all, and Brian become “the adult” in charge of the adventure. Brian sends the 200 pounds of supplies back with the plane that flew them in, and commences to recreate the world he knew in the first two books. Half the book is a terrifying trip over 100 miles, 3+ days, down a river, its rapids, lakes and swamps, with Derek unconscious on a wilderness made raft. We get a first hand look at the guts necessary to achieve this. Again, the manage to make a trapper’s cabin and are rescued.

In “Brian’s Return” we see Brian not fitting back into civilization, 15 - 16 year old’s school and society. Brian has adjusted to the Wilderness, and that is the reality he much prefers. Brian takes along a few supplies an d does very well.

In “The Hunt” Brian is back in the North Woods learning more woods lore and ways. By now he is nearly a expert. Brian finds an old man, Billy, in his camp one evening. Billy and Brian share a mutual evening of silent communication and while few words are exchanged, Brian gains “medicine.”’ In respect, Billy, leaving camp very early before Brian is awake, leaves a amulet of white tail deer fur and crow’s feathers for Brian. Brian recognizes the significance of this and immediately hangs it around his neck. Shortly thereafter, Brian and a wounded dog find each other. It turns out the dog belonged to the Cree Family Brian had met in “Brian’s Winter.” Unfortunately, a bear had devastated the cabin and family of the Cree family , killing two members of that family. Brian rescues the wife, buries the dead, and deals with the stoic, bureaucratic officials. Once they leave, Brian hunts and in a wonderful scene - which I will not spoil - kills the bear.

“Guts” is stories from Gary Paulsen’s life, rough childhood, adventures in Minnesota, Canada, the American South West, Colorado. These episodes Gary wove into Brian’s Story - a story beautifully and touchingly told. Gary’s knowledge and actual experiences gave him the insight to write the Brian Saga. Not only is the woods lore appropriately, accurately and well handled, but the changes that the North Woods induces in Brian are well followed. The books are at once a deep lesson in both survival and in life. We learn much about wilderness living. But we also are treated to the contrasts of life in the city and in the Wilderness.

Due a few violent scenes, this series should not be read by youth under 13 or so. Death is a part of life, and life is an endless living with what is there. It takes “guts”, perseverance, and patience, to achieve what Brian achieved, and that is the real message of these books. Life takes Real Guts,lots of perseverance, and lots of patience.

The books read very well. The stories are well told. The reading level is at least 8th grade. And for those with an interest in Nature and the Wilderness, be it North Woods, SW desert or ocean, the lessons apply. I found the reading to be extremely enjoyable, and the lessons deep and well taught without being preachy. A great series of books.

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Jim

A fun read!

Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2023

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I am a dad of 10 trying to read ahead of them to keep the trash out of their head. Wish me well.

A good book to encourage the reader to believe that they are their best tool to help themselves. That's true in every aspect of life!

I did 3 redactions for my notes in case we have to replace the book:
pg 19 word between "food" and "food" - honestly don't remember what the word was. Forgive me.
pg 29 anal retentive (is a weird saying to me)
pg 112 last sentence at the end of the middle paragraph. Again, don't remember why. I'm doing this review way later then when I read it.

Read on parents!

One person found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Can't put it down! Brian's determination and will to survive is infectious.

Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2024

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It was an easy to read and follow adventure story about, what could be, a true life story of determination and survival. Brian learned the value of making the most of the natural resources available to him without abusing them. He became a true pioneer of a great wilderness in our modern day.

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Andrew Smith

Short but oh so sweet

Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2022

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Definitely a good read I would recommend the whole series to anyone looking for light reading

Great books and great author

One person found this helpful

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Britney Bartz

Almost relaxed

Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2024

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I think this is my favorite of the sequels so far. Brian does show some realistic negative impacts from his time in the woods. However, I love the sense of peace and the thoughts he has. Brian has grown and appreciates the woods in a way more should. Great addition to the series.

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Sonam B. willow

My Life Restoring reading this book

Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2021

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I chose this book because I am reading Gary Paulsens series The Hatchet. Filling my spirit w the elements that ring true about finding myself in the woods. I love the prose of The Return and was sad it was shorter than I wanted. Thank you to Mr. PAULSEN for this book especially.

One person found this helpful

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Jean Sym

Brian’s Return

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2021

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My son reads on a 6th grade level & he loves this book. He actually read all the books in this series. They keep his interest & are on an appropriate level for a sixth grader.

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Catherine

Great series for younger readers

Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2021

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Bought this as a follow-up to the first in the series "The Hatchet" for my grandson. He absolutely LOVES these books and was so excited to get another by this author.

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Diana A.

Fue lo que pedí

Reviewed in Mexico on November 1, 2023

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Justo lo que dice la descripción

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IceoticWolf

Great

Reviewed in Canada on May 7, 2024

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This book takes place after Brian’s Winter and continues Brian’s journey with his new life as a teenager. Brian is different from when we first read about him in the first book The Hatchet. Then the sequel Brian’s Winter. This one is a sequel to Brian’s Winter and follows him as he lives life back into society. The wilderness has changed him and in this book we learn about this change. It’s a fantastic end to a great series about the Canadian wilderness.

Fabian

Wunderbar

Reviewed in Germany on June 17, 2021

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Sehr schöne Fortsetzung. Wirklich toll wie alles beschrieben ist, die Magie des Ganzen und die Anziehung zu so einem Leben sind gross. Wirklich schön zu lesen, hoffe es kommen noch mehr Teilw dazu. Danle für die schöne Geschichte!

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Hari

Childrens book for a big kid!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 1, 2013

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I read the first of this series (Hatchet) when I was 10 and loved it, now at 31 I have finally read all of the others in the series and loved them too.

Scott ontario

Awesome!

Reviewed in Canada on March 31, 2022

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Great series. My 8yr old and I read them all

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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