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Brian felt his eyes beginning to burn and knew there would be tears. He had cried for a time, but that was gone now. He didn’t cry now. Instead his eyes burned and tears came, the seeping tears that burned, but he didn’t cry.
On the plane to visit his father, Brian is preoccupied thinking about his parents’ divorce. Specifically, Brian is thinking about his mother’s affair, which Brian calls “The Secret.” Brian is hurt by his mother’s betrayal of his father, and by the new circumstances of his family being separated, leaving him simmering. While the tears are not fresh, Brian is still emotionally wounded at the beginning of the novel.
He had to fly it somehow. Had to fly the plane. He had to help himself. The pilot was gone, beyond anything he could do. He had to try and fly the plane.
Brian has these thoughts as soon as the pilot can no longer fly, indicating that Brian already has a strong survival instinct. Instead of sitting helpless after the pilot’s heart attack, Brian tries to figure out how to fly the plane himself, or at least keep it from crashing violently. Brian’s quick thinking helps him to make regular radio calls, create a plan for when the plane runs out of fuel, and to eventually pull himself out of the crashed plane. Later, this nascent survival instinct helps him find ways to persist in the wild rather than believing he isn’t capable.
For the first time since the crash he was not thinking of himself, of his own life. Brian was wondering if the bear was as surprised as he to find another being in the berries.
At the beginning of the story, Brian is absorbed in his own emotions and struggles. He is consumed by his parents’ divorce, then by keeping himself alive after the pilot dies. When the plane goes down, Brian needs to focus all his energy on survival. A few days into being stranded, Brian encounters a bear while gathering raspberries. He is terrified, but the bear does not attack him. Brian considers the bear’s behavior, and wonders about its thoughts and life. This pondering is a mark of Brian’s growing maturity, that he can think beyond his own survival and about the world outside himself.
He could feel new hope building in him. Not hope that he would be rescued – that was gone. But hope in his knowledge. Hope in the fact that he could learn and survive and take care of himself. Tough hope, he thought that night. I am full of tough hope.
The more Brian learns in the wild, the more confident he becomes in his ability to survive. At first, the main thing motivating him to stay alive is the hope that he will be rescued soon, and he only needs to last until then. When a search plane misses him, he loses that source of hope and needs to find another motivation to live. Brian’s first reaction is one of hopelessness as he attempts suicide, but he does not die. Afterward, he latches on to his competency and begins to trust his own abilities. Brian is not yet concerned about his long-term future, but he knows he has what he needs to keep himself alive, and that knowledge helps him through.
“That was the kind of thing I would have done before,” he said to the lake, to the sky, to the trees. “When I came here – I would have done that. Not now. Not now…”
Brian undergoes such a drastic change during his time in the wild that he draws a line in his mind between the person he was when the plane crashed and the person he learns to be as he survives. When the plane resurfaces and Brian tries to retrieve the survival kit from it, he drops his hatchet into the lake. Brian angrily chides himself, believing he is no longer the person who would make that kind of mistake. Brian knows impatience and clumsiness are his enemies when survival is at stake, and he treats the dropped hatchet as a serious blunder. At the beginning of the novel, he calls the hatchet “hokey” but by the end it is one of his most valuable and least expendable tools.
