It is 1848, and Francis Tucket is heading west on the Oregon Trail with his family. Yesterday he celebrated his 14th birthday on the tailgate of a Conestoga wagon in the foothills of the Rockies. Today, he is going to practice with his new birthday present, a Lancaster rifle. Falling far behind the wagon train, Francis loses sight of his family and is kidnapped by Pawnee Indians.

Fourteen-year-old John Barron is asked, like his father and grandfather before him, to spend the summer taking care of their sheep in the haymeadow. Six thousand sheep. John will be alone, except for two horses, four dogs, and all those sheep. John doesn't feel up to the task, but he hopes that if he can accomplish it, he will finally please his father. But John finds that the adage "things just to sheep" is true when the river floods, coyotes attack, and one dog's feet get cut.

Samuel, 13, spends his days in the forest, hunting for food for his family. He has grown up on the frontier of a British colony, America. Far from any town, or news of the war against the King that American patriots have begun near Boston.

Newbery Award-winner Gary Paulsen's best-known book comes to audio in this breathless, heart-gripping drama about a boy pitted against the wilderness with only a hatchet and a will to live. On his way to visit his recently divorced father in the Canadian mountains, thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson is the only survivor when the single-engine plane crashes. His body battered, his clothes in shreds, Brian must now stay alive in the boundless Canadian wilderness.

When a deadly plague reaches the small fish camp where he lives, an orphan named Leif is forced to take to the water in a cedar canoe. He flees northward, following a wild, fjord-riven shore, navigating from one danger to the next, unsure of his destination. But the deeper into his journey he paddles, the closer he comes to his truest self as he connects to “the heartbeat of the ocean...the pulse of the sea”.

His name is synonymous with high-stakes wilderness survival stories. Now, beloved author Gary Paulsen portrays a series of life-altering moments from his turbulent childhood as his own original survival story. If not for his summer escape from a shockingly neglectful Chicago upbringing to a North Woods homestead at age five, there never would have been a Hatchet. Without the encouragement of the librarian who handed him his first book at age 13, he may never have become a reader.

“I’m 11-years-old, from the city, and my parents are mean alcoholics. One day the deputy takes me away to live with some distant relatives on their sprawling farm in the country. At the Larsen farm, I meet my Uncle Knute and Aunt Clair and their two children, Glennis and her wild brother Harris. I also meet Louie, the crusty old guy who works as a farmhand and steals all the pancakes at breakfast. Harris introduces me to life on the farm, and it proves to be a rude awakening."

Thirteen-year-old Mark Harrison has a week to hike across the desert. He will meet his parents on the other side. By his fourth day, he’s made good time. As he settles in for the night, he gazes up at the stars, feeling completely content. Suddenly, a blue light streams from the sky, jolting Mark into another dimension. Now, in a land filled with strange jungle animals and primitive tribes, Mark desperately battles hunger, armed enemies, and superhuman powers.

"One day I was 12 years old and broke. I set out to mow some lawns with Grandpa's old riding mower. One client was Arnold the stockbroker, who offered to teach me about: the beauty of capitalism. Supply and demand. Diversifying labor. Distributing the wealth. 'It's groovy, man,' Arnold said. The grass grew, and so did business. Arnold invested my money in many things. One of them was a prizefighter. All of a sudden I was the sponsor of my very own fighter, Joey Pow."

Coyote Runs, an Apache boy, takes part in his first raid. But he is to be a man for only a short time. More than 100 years later, while camping near Dog Canyon, 15-year-old Brennan Cole becomes obsessed with a skull he finds, pierced by a bullet. He learns it is the skull of an Apache boy executed by soldiers in 1864. A mystical link joins Brennan and Coyote Runs, and Brennan knows that neither boy will find peace until Coyote Runs' skull is carried back to an ancient sacred place.

When his family packs up and moves from the city to a small town deep in the Wisconsin countryside, 15-year-old Wil Neuton makes an exhilarating discovery. He finds a small island on a nearby lake, a place where he can be alone and learn to know nature—and himself. On his island, he can write, paint, and watch the loons and fish in the lake. Wil can’t stay away from the outside world forever, though. Sooner or later, he must return and face the bully determined to fight him and his bickering parents, who worry when Wil decides to stay on the island indefinitely.

The Newbery Honor-winning author of Hatchet and Dogsong shares surprising true stories about his relationship with animals, highlighting their compassion, intellect, intuition, and sense of adventure. Gary Paulsen is an adventurer who competed in two Iditarods, survived the Minnesota wilderness, and climbed the Bighorns. None of this would have been possible without his truest companions: his animals.

The award-winning creator of popular survival stories turns his attention to his own real life adventures in Minnesota and Alaska as he prepares for the grueling Iditarod sled dog race.

These essays recount his adventures alone and with friends, taking listeners through the seasons. In Paulsen’s north country, every expedition is a major one, and often hilarious. Once again Gary Paulsen demonstrates why he is one of America’s most beloved writers, for he shows us fishing and hunting as pleasure, as art, as companionship, and as source of life’s deepest lessons.

The year is 2057. Endless wars have torn the USA apart and enslaved Americans to the evil CCR, the Confederation of Consolidated Republics. Growing up in wartime has made 14-year-old Cody Pierce wise in survival skills. Now he’s The White Fox, rebel leader of the children’s barracks in a CCR prison camp. Cody manages a terrifying escape and then plays cat and mouse with the CCR. Every day brings him closer to capture, but closer as well to his goal - to return and liberate the children he left behind.

Cowboy stories and movies about the Wild West are full of amazing characters. Yet many of the lawmen we think of as heroes were anything but - some were violent scoundrels and outlaws themselves. Among all the lawmen of the frontier, one man stands out as a true hero: Bass Reeves. In his day, Bass Reeves was the most successful federal marshal in the United States. True to the mythical code of the West, he never drew his gun first. He rounded up hundreds of outlaws and was shot at countless times but was never hit. Bass Reeves was born into slavery.

Bobby Hale is a Union veteran several times over. After the war, he sets his sights on California, but only makes it to Montana. As he stumbles around the West, from the Wyoming Territory to the Black Hills of the Dakotas, he finds meaning in the people he meets - settlers and native people - and the violent history he both participates in and witnesses.

Mauled by a giant grizzly and left to die, 16 year-old Jose Olano's chances for life were remote. Then, like a guardian angel, came Robert "Gray Eagle" McAllister, one-time army scout and sometime outlaw. In his flight to escape a posse, he finds the brutalized body of Jose. Knowing his decision to help Jose may mean his own death, he stays and brings Jose back from the brink of death. Thus began one of the greatest companionships ever known to the Idaho frontier.

When Zach Connors and his pa left their Kentucky homestead in the summer of 1824 to see the Rocky Mountains, he didn't realize he would never see his childhood home again or that he would find love, friendship, fame, and a new home in this wild and harsh wilderness. After a grizzly kills his pa, Zach struggles to survive a cold and brutal winter alone. After killing a rouge grizzly and fighting hostile Indians on his own, he becomes known as Grizzly Killer and is respected throughout the West. Along with his dog, Jimbo, whom the Indians call the Great Medicine Dog, he finds Running Wolf, an injured Ute warrior, and together they fight off a hostile war party. They rescue two Shoshone sisters from the brutality of a French trapper and take them as wives.

It's 1867 in the Wyoming Territory. Chance Creager and his brothers have built their small, isolated ranch in the uninhabited valley near the Greybull River. While hunting, Chance stumbles upon a decaying wagon sunk in mud, near it the grisly remains of an Indian sacrifice. Nothing about the eerie scene makes sense. The mountains have secrets. Chance finds himself pulled deeper into the mystery when he finds a beautiful fugitive named Raven while hunting a deadly mountain lion.

Parker Stanley's family had a dream: to start a new life in the Far West. But en route, a Cheyenne band slaughters his parents and abducts his sister. Then cowboy Clay Springer rides to the rescue - and comes up with an idea. He's got a team ready to deliver goods to the Mormons in Utah, but he's short on funds for supplies. He knows that Parker managed to hold on to his family's savings, so he suggests a 50-50 partnership. With a three-wagon, seven-man team, Parker and Clay will traverse the barren land, but out in the wilderness, Parker's sister needs saving - and he has vowed to find her.

Audie Award, Literary Fiction, 2016. The story of Jack Crabbe, raised by both a white man and a Cheyenne chief. As a Cheyenne, Jack ate dog, had four wives, and saw his people butchered by General Custer's soldiers. As a white man, he participated in the slaughter of the buffalo and tangled with Wyatt Earp.

Can a rough Texas Ranger overcome a woman’s hardened heart? Amanda Ross returns from her Boston finishing school to claim the Texas ranch her parents died fighting to protect. Determined to protect the sprawling ranch that has been in her family for generations, Amanda hates the Comanche people for taking away her only family. Clay McAlester may be a Texas Ranger, but he identifies most strongly with the Comanche people that raised him.

In 1836, when she was nine years old, Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanche Indians. This is the story of how she grew up with them, mastered their ways, married one of their leaders, and became, in every way, a Comanche woman. It is also the story of a proud and innocent people whose lives pulsed with the very heartbeat of the land. It is the story of a way of life that is gone forever.

In 1829, Jacob and Martin left Kentucky to become Mountain Men, trappers of the Rocky Mountains. The rugged mountains that lay beyond America's frontier remained mostly unexplored. In those days, when beaver were plentiful and the buffalo roamed freely, the killing was good. The two young men would also find that life would be hardscrabble in the high frontier. They would face grizzly bears and hostile Indians. And they would risk horse wrecks and mountain storms to trade their furs each year at "rendezvous".

On nothing more than a lark, he leaves his family and begins a journey from Ohio westward. Along the way, he runs up against badlands and bad men, loses his freedom, gains his freedom and learns the first rule of the frontier: Do whatever it takes to survive. With ruthless enemies after him - both White men and Indians - he’ll head for a place as brutal as it is beautiful - the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains.

Rancher Staten Kirkland, the last descendant of Ransom Canyon's founding father, is rugged and practical to the last. No one knows that when his troubling memories threaten to overwhelm him, he runs to lovely, reclusive Quinn O'Grady...or that she has her own secret that no one living knows. Young Lucas Reyes has his eye on the prize - college, and the chance to become something more than a ranch hand's son. But one night, one wrong decision will set his life on a course even he hadn't imagined.

The Moody family moves from New Hampshire to a Colorado ranch. Experience the pleasures and perils of ranching in 20th Century America, through the eyes of a youngster.

A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post - Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American history.

Growing up without parents and without schooling, 14-year-old Cloyd is trouble - trouble to himself and everyone else. Sent by his tribe to a home for Indian boys, he is alone and half-wild in remote Utah canyons. As his feeling of isolation turns to desperation, he runs away to find even more trouble. When Cloyd is found and taken to live with an old rancher, he begins to explore the countryside.

It is 1848, and Francis Tucket is heading west on the Oregon Trail with his family. Yesterday he celebrated his 14th birthday on the tailgate of a Conestoga wagon in the foothills of the Rockies. Today, he is going to practice with his new birthday present, a Lancaster rifle. Falling far behind the wagon train, Francis loses sight of his family and is kidnapped by Pawnee Indians.

Thirteen-year-old Mark Harrison has a week to hike across the desert. He will meet his parents on the other side. By his fourth day, he’s made good time. As he settles in for the night, he gazes up at the stars, feeling completely content. Suddenly, a blue light streams from the sky, jolting Mark into another dimension. Now, in a land filled with strange jungle animals and primitive tribes, Mark desperately battles hunger, armed enemies, and superhuman powers.

When a deadly plague reaches the small fish camp where he lives, an orphan named Leif is forced to take to the water in a cedar canoe. He flees northward, following a wild, fjord-riven shore, navigating from one danger to the next, unsure of his destination. But the deeper into his journey he paddles, the closer he comes to his truest self as he connects to “the heartbeat of the ocean...the pulse of the sea”.

Newbery Award-winner Gary Paulsen's best-known book comes to audio in this breathless, heart-gripping drama about a boy pitted against the wilderness with only a hatchet and a will to live. On his way to visit his recently divorced father in the Canadian mountains, thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson is the only survivor when the single-engine plane crashes. His body battered, his clothes in shreds, Brian must now stay alive in the boundless Canadian wilderness.

When his family packs up and moves from the city to a small town deep in the Wisconsin countryside, 15-year-old Wil Neuton makes an exhilarating discovery. He finds a small island on a nearby lake, a place where he can be alone and learn to know nature—and himself. On his island, he can write, paint, and watch the loons and fish in the lake. Wil can’t stay away from the outside world forever, though. Sooner or later, he must return and face the bully determined to fight him and his bickering parents, who worry when Wil decides to stay on the island indefinitely.