The River

The River is a young adult novel by the American writer Gary Paulsen, published in 1991. It is also known as The Return and Hatchet: The Return, and it is the second book of the Hatchet series.

The novel takes up Brian Robeson after his fifty-four days alone in the wilderness, when he has returned home changed by what he lived through and is asked to help a government survival team learn what he did and how. The plan is for him to repeat the experience with a psychologist alongside him and supplies nearby, which removes most of the danger and, as it turns out, does not. Paulsen had written the first book for readers who wanted to know what happened to the character next, and this one tests the skills Brian learned rather than teaching them again, with the second half turning back into a survival story when the arrangement goes wrong. The author's note in the 1993 reprint explains where the story came from and how it stands beside the other books.

Paulsen wrote more than two hundred books, many of them about the outdoors and about young people surviving on their own, and the Hatchet series continues in Brian's Winter and later novels.