Free Hatchet (9781442403321) by Gary Paulsen

tinder or kindling—but what? He brought some dried grass in, tapped sparks into it, and watched them die. He tried small twigs, breaking them into little pieces, but that was worse than the grass. Then he tried a combination of the two, grass and twigs.
    Nothing. He had no trouble getting sparks, but the tiny bits of hot stone or metal—he couldn’t tell which they were—just sputtered and died.
    He needed something finer, something soft and fine and fluffy to catch the bits of fire.
    Shredded paper would be nice, but he had no paper.
    â€œSo close,” he said aloud, “so close . . .”
    He put the hatchet back in his belt and went out of the shelter, limping on his sore leg. There had to be something, had to be. Man had made fire. There had been fire for thousands, millions of years. There had to be a way. He dug into his pockets and found the twenty-dollar bill in his wallet. Paper. Worthless paper out here. But if he could get a fire going . . .
    He ripped the twenty into tiny pieces, made a pile of pieces, and hit sparks into them. Nothing happened. They just wouldn’t take the sparks. But there had to be a way—some way to do it.
    Not twenty feet to his right, leaning out over the water were birches and he stood looking at them for a full half-minute before they registered in his mind. They were a beautiful white with bark like clean, slightly speckled paper.
    Paper.
    He moved to the trees. Where the bark was peeling from the trunks it lifted in tiny tendrils, almost fluffs. Brian plucked some of them loose, rolled them in his fingers. They seemed flammable, dry and nearly powdery. He pulled and twisted bits off the trees, packing them in one hand while he picked them with the other, picking and gathering until he had a wad close to the size of a baseball.
    Then he went back into the shelter and arranged the ball of birchbark peelings at the base of the black rock. As anafterthought he threw in the remains of the twenty-dollar bill. He struck and a stream of sparks fell into the bark and quickly died. But this time one spark fell on one small hair of dry bark—almost a thread of bark—and seemed to glow a bit brighter before it died.
    The material had to be finer. There had to be a soft and incredibly fine nest for the sparks.
    I must make a home for the sparks, he thought. A perfect home or they won’t stay, they won’t make fire.
    He started ripping the bark, using his fingernails at first, and when that didn’t work he used the sharp edge of the hatchet, cutting the bark in thin slivers, hairs so fine they were almost not there. It was painstaking work, slow work, and he stayed with it for over two hours. Twice he stopped for a handful of berries and once to go to the lake for a drink. Then back to work, the sun on his back, until at last he had a ball of fluff as big as a grapefruit—dry birchbark fluff.
    He positioned his spark nest—as he thought of it—at the base of the rock, used his thumb to make a small depression in the middle, and slammed the back of the hatchet down across the black rock. A cloud of sparks rained down, most of them missing the nest, but some, perhaps thirty or so, hit in the depression and of those six or seven found fuel and grew, smoldered and caused the bark to take on the red glow.
    Then they went out.
    Close—he was close. He repositioned the nest, made a new and smaller dent with his thumb, and struck again.
    More sparks, a slight glow, then nothing.
    It’s me, he thought. I’m doing something wrong. I do not know this—a cave dweller would have had a fire by now, a Cro-Magnon man would have a fire by now—but I don’t know this. I don’t know how to make a fire.
    Maybe not enough sparks. He settled the nest in place once more and hit the rock with a series of blows, as fast as he could. The sparks flowed like a golden waterfall. At first they seemed to take, there were several,