Brian Robeson is a thirteen-year-old son of divorced parents. As he travels from Hampton, New York on a single-engine Cessna bush plane to visit his father in the oil fields in Northern Canada for the summer, the pilot suffers a massive heart attack and dies. Brian tries to land the plane but ends up crash-landing into a lake in the forest. He must learn to survive on his own with nothing but his hatchet—a gift his mother gave him shortly before his plane departed.