A 12-year-old girl remembered a technique she read about in one of The Hunger Games novels and used it to tie a tourniquet around a friend's open leg wound.

Megan Gething and friend Mackenzie George were playing a marsh in Gloucester, Massachusetts when Mackenzie fell and cut her calf open on a steel pump.

Megan quickly used a pair of shorts to fashion a tourniquet on the wound and applied pressure to stem the bleeding.

"I knew it from a book I read," she said of the young adult fiction trilogy written by Suzanne Collins. "I figured it was a well-known method of stopping bleeding," Megan told The Gloucester Times.

The main character in the series, Katniss Everdeen, lives in a dystopian future and is often in nature hunting, fighting, and trying to survive a morbid game pitting young people against each other in life-threatening situations.

Mackenzie was taken to hospital and doctors said there was no muscle or nerve damage to her leg. Her parents are thankful for Megan's quick thinking and help in what could have been a dire situation had she lost more blood.