Answer: n Chapter 8, Brian wakes up in the middle of the night to a hissing sound and a terrible smell in his little shelter. He thinks it's a snake and throws his hatchet at it. The hatchet misses, hitting the wall and making a shower of sparks, and the creature gets closer. It's not a snake, it's a porcupine. Brian kicks at it, but the porcupine sticks him in the leg with its tail and runs off.
It's while he's pulling the porcupine quills out of his leg that Brian learns what becomes his most important lesson. He's understandably down in the dumps about being stranded and now stung by a porcupine, but then ''he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work.'' It won't get the quills out of his leg and won't make fire, so Brian decides to stop it entirely and get to work. Once he's all cried out and quill-free, Brian gets back to sleep.
Brian's Dream
Unlike a lot of Brian's other dreams over the course of Hatchet, the dream he has after getting stung isn't about his mother's affair, or even really about any event from his past. First, Brian sees his father in a living room, making scratching gestures and trying to say something to Brian. Brian is frustrated and can't understand what his father is saying when the dream transitions to a park scene with his friend Terry.
Step-by-step explanation: