This term, Mrs Brennan’s Year 9 English class studied the theme of survival by reading Gary Paulsen’s famous novel, Hatchet. This popular story features Brian Robeson, a twelve-year-old boy, who finds himself stranded in the Canadian wilderness with only one tool - you guessed it - a hatchet. With the help of his trusty hatchet, Brian must build a shelter, start a fire, hunt fish and birds, and protect himself from wild animals including moose, black bears and wolves.

Making fire from scratch proved to be a very difficult job for Brian. His hatchet created lots of sparks when hit against a rock, but converting these into fire took days of trial and error until finally, Brian sourced the perfect tinder and applied just the right amount of oxygen to turn the sparks into flames. The fire not only allowed Brian to cook the fish he caught, but it also kept the mosquitoes at bay, deterred animals like porcupine and skunks, kept him warm and gave him hope that should a rescue plane fly over, it would notice the smoke.

Building our own fires without any artificial assistance was the object of Friday’s lesson. Armed with a brilliant tool loaned to us by Mr Paul West of the Science Department, we first sourced our fuel, including tinder, kindling and larger pieces of wood and left them to dry out for a few days. The boys then got to work creating shavings from Mr West’s block of solid magnesium and lighting these with sparks generated from a pocket knife and a flint. In the photos, you can see the boys creating the sparks and blowing gently to turn the tiny flames into fire. (We did cheat just a tiny bit by using a paper towel to collect the magnesium shavings.)

For the remainder of the lesson, the boys enjoyed feeding the fires and toasting marshmallows. Most importantly, we made sure the fires were completely out before we left. I think this is a lesson the boys won’t soon forget.