Never Say Die |Outline

Never Say Die is a book written by  Will Hobbs.  It is about a fifteen-year-old Inuit boy named Nick that lives in Canada.  He is an avid hunter, and he puts his skills to good use when he goes on a month-long expedition with his older half brother, and they lose all of their gear in a rafting accident. It wasn’t clear what year the book was set in, but I’m pretty sure it was 2013.

The Exposition

The exposition (introduction) in Never Say Die is in the first chapter when Nick Thrasher is hunting Caribou. He shoots a big bull, butchers it, and loads it into his pack. then starts walking the three miles back home.  When he is almost to his boat, he gets charged by a huge bear.  The bear is too close for Nick to be able to shoot it.  Plus, this bear isn’t any normal bear. It’s half Polar bear, half Grizzly. The bear rips Nick’s pack off of his back with one swipe of its massive paw and busies itself with eating the caribou meat.  Nick manages to get away with his life. He was lucky, though. If the bear’s paw would’ve gone 2 inches further down, Nick’s back would’ve been totally ripped open.  The bear was nicknamed a “Grolar bear”.

The Rising Action

The rising action starts when Nick gets a letter from his half-brother Ryan who he’s never met before, asking him to come on a month long expedition with him to “Hunter’s Paradise”.  This is a place where the game is incredibly abundant.  Ryan is a writer/photographer for the National Geographic Magazine. They want him to get pictures and stories of the climate change, and its effects up in Canada.  Ryan is also a whitewater rafting guide. Anyways, Nick decides to go with him, but Ryan wouldn’t let him bring his gun.  On their first day out, Ryan is busy taking pictures of a grizzly bear crossing the river that they are rafting on, that he doesn’t look ahead.  The raft hits a huge sheet of ice that spans the whole river.  The raft flips up, throwing Nick and Ryan out. They get swept under the ice, where they couldn’t breathe, but they miraculously escape. Unfortunately, they are on opposite sides of the river, and it’s too dangerous to try to cross.  They start traveling down-river, trying to keep in sight of each other. Eventually, Ryan and Nick reunite and find the raft. Most of their gear was dry, including their GPS, and Satellite phone. After getting to be right smack in the middle of a heard of 1500 Caribou, and getting lots of great pictures, Nick and Ryan decide to head home.

Climax

The climax is when Nick and Ryan are rafting down the river, and the see the feared Grolar Bear.  He has just attacked 2 other rafters and they are pretty sure that he killed them both.  They hightail it out of there.  Later that day, a huge storm breaks. Thunder, lightning, rain, and then snow.  Nick remembers a small cabin that his grampa had told him about, that was close to where they were.  They take shelter in it until the storm subsides.  The next day, they go outside to check on the damage that the storm had done.  Before they head out, Nick grabs an old harpoon that was hanging on the wall.  Outside, they walked to the beach that was a short ways away.  Nick and Ryan saw two polar bears that had drowned in the storm and had washed up on the beach.  Then, they noticed another bear. This one was alive, and eating the other bears. It was the Grolar bear.  The bear charges them. After mauling Ryan, he turned to Nick. Nick grabbed the harpoon, aimed and launched it with all of his strength at the massive beast’s chest.  The bear stood up tall on its hind legs and then fell with a thud to the ground. Dead. Ryan wasn’t fatally wounded, so Nick helped him to the cabin, cleaned his wounds, and bandaged them up.

Falling Action/Resolution

The helicopter that was scheduled to come pick Ryan and Nick up came, and took them back home.  Ryan wrote his story for National Geographic, and Nick returned to normal life in Canada. That’s pretty much the end!