In Gary Paulsen's The River, the protagonist Brian is an intelligent and resourceful young man who uses his wits and intelligence to survive in the wilderness. Brian recalls looking at the map with his mother. Before he left, he showed his mother where he would be on the map.

Brian quickly begins to grow skeptical of the accuracy of the map, at one point believing that whoever had drawn the map was "probably wearing a tie" and simply made up names for the lakes and rivers as he went along. Of course, even with Brian's skepticism about the map, it serves a practical purpose of helping him navigate.

Brian eventually learns that the map is definitely inaccurate once he realizes that the lake he had just crossed wasn't represented on the map. The text reads:

the lake he had crossed did not show. He was positive. There were lakes, some large and small, but he was not moving fast enough to have reached any of them yet and that meant the map was not accurate (109)

The trust Brian placed in the map frustrates him, but before long he comes to the understanding that even if the map was wrong about the lake, it could still be "mostly right" about other landmarks. This challenges Brian to use his own common sense while using the map rather than trusting it entirely.