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