76 pages • 2 hours read
Gary PaulsenBrian's Winter
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 2, Chapter 16-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Winter”
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary
The weather warms a little the next day, and Brian resolves to get outside to explore more. He doesn’t want to stay in his shelter between hunts. After packing his weapons and some meat, he ventures outside. At first, he doesn’t go too far, but after a few days of exploring, he realizes he could never truly be lost in these woods. They are his home now.
One day, he stalks a moose—not to kill it, but just to observe it. While he’s watching, wolves come from behind the trees and attack the moose’s rear in quick, biting attacks. They tear open the moose and begin pulling at the meat, eating him while he’s still alive. Witnessing this event shakes Brian. He never feared the wolves before, but now he does. He understands that they must kill to survive, but is disgusted by the slow and cruel death the moose suffers. That night, he dreams of home, and awakens at a gunshot sound: He assumes its trees exploding in the distance again. However, in the morning, he realizes that the weather has grown too warm for trees to explode, so the sound must have been something else.
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary
The only explanation Brian can think of for the sound is a gunshot. He listens for it all day, but does not hear it again, and resolves to go look for signs of what the sound could have been. Early the next morning, Brian sets out. After walking a few miles, he spots a straight line cutting through the snow. He knows that straight lines are not common in nature, and can see that the line is not a natural trail. Unsure of what he’s seeing and what it could mean, Brian follows the line all day, and just as darkness falls, he smells smoke. As he comes around a tree, he sees four large malamutes, and beyond them, a log shelter. A Native American man emerges to greet him, saying, “I wondered when you’d come by” (129). Brian is shocked. He has not seen or spoken to a human in so long. The man invites him inside, and Brian cannot form the words for a response, but follows the man into the cabin.
Epilogue Summary
The man, named David Smallhorn, lives in the shelter with his wife and two children. They are Cree trappers, who come each year during the winter. A plane comes every six weeks to bring them supplies, and Brian stays with them for three weeks until the plane comes again. The Smallhorns had not heard about Brian’s plane crash, and thought he was another trapper. After they finish dinner on that first night, Brian explains how he ended up in the woods and had to survive on his own. David takes Brian to check his trapline, and Brian shows the Smallhorns his bows and killing lance, explaining how he made them. Brian quickly feels at home with the Smallhorns, and when the plane arrives a few weeks later, he finds it hard to leave the woods and the Smallhorns. The woods have become a part of Brian, and David recognizes this, saying, “It will be here when you come back” (133).
Part 2, Chapter 16-Epilogue Analysis
Paulsen highlights the human need for creative or intellectual activity by emphasizing Brian’s desire to go outside, not to do a survival task such as gathering wood or hunting, but to explore, learn, and appreciate nature. He stalks a moose simply “to know, to see” (120)—now that he has met his most basic material needs, Brian can explore the more cerebral parts of his humanity. When he witnesses wolves ripping apart the moose, he feels a deep sense of injustice. The horror and violence of the moose’s death triggers Brian’s unsettled response to death. Though Brian has had to adopt the morality of the wild to survive, his innate humanity and desire for fairness is never far from the surface of his thoughts.
Nevertheless, Brian feels a pull towards the natural world, revealing how much he has changed. He feels comfortable in a new way in the wild now: “in a very real sense he was always home now in the woods” (119), so much so that he finds it difficult to leave the woods behind. As much as he dreams of returning to his mother, he now feels an abiding connection to nature. The novel offers Brian and the reader a vision of what life half in and half out of the wilderness could look like through the example of the Smallhorns, a family who cultivates both human connection and the desire to be in the woods—this could be how Brian decides to spend his adulthood as well.
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By Gary Paulsen
