39 pages • 1 hour read
Gary PaulsenWoodsong
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Blood amid Beauty
The most important lessons that the author learns about the wilderness are painted in blood. He learns that blood and death are essential parts of an otherwise beautiful world, bleeding is sometimes a part of everyday life in the wild, and death itself is sometimes welcomed in the animal kingdom.
Until he was 40, the author believed in the Disney version of nature, where death is neat and tidy. One day, while dogsledding, he witnesses for the first time a kill committed by a non-human predator. It’s horrifically gruesome, with blood everywhere, the victim still alive even as it’s consumed. This terrible event convinces the author that the natural world isn’t an orderly place where death is quiet and quick but a ruthlessly messy and gory one. The pain animals feel is real; he no longer wants to inflict pain on them through hunting.
At the same time, he realizes that the animals involved don’t see themselves as vicious: “Wolves don’t know they are wolves” (8). The beauty of nature is silent; so, too, is the ugliness. Predators don’t think of themselves in human terms, and it doesn’t occur to them that they’re in any sense wicked; they’re simply doing what they’re born to do. They can’t consider their victims’ pain, but Paulsen can, and he feels the moral duty to cease and desist.
A second lesson comes from one of his sled dogs, Storm, to whom he feeds a dry food that’s bad for dogs because it can lacerate their insides during a run. Storm bleeds suddenly from his rear on a sled trip, and the author tries to tie the dog down to the sled and carry him home, but Storm keeps wriggling free and resuming pulling on the sled. The dog survives nicely and continues his life as if nothing happened: “The blood, the anxiety I felt, the horror of it meant as little to Storm as the blood from the deer on the snow had meant to the wolves” (19-20).
Midway through the Iditarod race, the air is so cold that it freezes the author’s throat, bursting blood vessels and clogging up with mucous. He must reach into his throat to clear the mess; this goes on for many hours. Thus, he, too, bleeds and suffers during his encounter with a harsh wilderness. He must accept this and move forward. It’s a rite of passage, an initiation into a deeper level of the natural world.
These lessons teach the author that blood and death are a part of the natural world. Accepting them as inevitable gives a person the freedom to fully embrace life in all its beauty and horror.
The Wisdom of Animals
Animals have finely tuned instincts; their judgment, often instantaneous, is highly accurate. Like humans, they feel emotions deeply, and it’s a mistake to underestimate their minds. These are truths the author learns mainly from his dogs.
Lead dog Cookie teaches the author a critical lesson early in their work together. The author at first believes he knows better than his dogs how to go from point A to point B, but he soon learns that the canines have a much better sense of where they are in the world. During a snowstorm near a ridge, he orders Cookie to go right, but the dog keeps leading to the left. Finally, he grabs the dog and forces her to head to the right. She obeys, and the entire team topples off a cliff. They land in a heap on the snow; “Cookie had knowingly taken the team over the edge of a sharp drop. It was something she never would have done on her own” (68). The dogs refuse to move for the next 18 hours.
On another winter run, the author falls from the sled, topples over a frozen waterfall, and is too injured to walk. The dogs, at first unaware, keep pulling—teams can go for miles without their drivers—but the lead dog, Obeah, realizes the problem, turns the team around, and heads back to reunite with his driver.
Dogs like to play, and they can be mischievous. One, Columbia, plays a trick on another dog, Olaf, who’s known to be a bit of a bully. Columbia places his dog bone just inches out of reach of Olaf, who strains but fails to snatch it; Columbia makes a laughing sound and turns away. On a run, Storm likes to turn to a nearby dog and snort in its ear; he also hides things that the author owns.
Of Columbia’s prank, Paulsen realizes that “if a dog could do that, then a wolf could do that. If a wolf could do that, then a deer could do that” (25), and he quits his job trapping beavers. Animals, he believes, are too aware, too perceptive, and too intelligent to treat as unfeeling objects that exist only to serve the needs of humans. Instead, we should admire them, working harmoniously with them instead of lording over them and ignoring their wisdom.
The Weirdness of Animals
One way to tell that animals have interesting minds is to notice that individual creatures can act in extremely strange and quirky ways. Dogs behave oddly, as any dog lover will attest, but the goofiness extends to all sorts of creatures.
Hawk is a small hen who guards her broods fiercely. The author finds grouse eggs in an abandoned nest and places them in her nest; she raises them as her own. When they first learn to fly and roost in nearby trees, they return to her call. Hawk, meanwhile, guards her regular chicks by standing on a tall woodpile and launching herself at anything—a cat, a fox, a person—that gets too near one of her babies and riding and clawing the offender mercilessly.
The author’s house dog, Fred, steals the sled dogs’ buried bones and other food, becoming obese. Placed on a strict diet-and-exercise program, Fred becomes testy. One day, he bumps into an electric fence; angry, he bites the wires, which shocks him even more. Furious, he launches himself at the wires, breaks them, and then pees on them.
The author feeds a bit of cookie to a chipmunk; just as the critter is about to accept the treat, a red squirrel rushes forward, kills the chipmunk, drags it away, and eats it. The horror of this act is exceeded only by its near-impossibility: Red squirrels “most decidedly do not attack and eat chipmunks” (49).
Some weirdness is understandable. During a sled run, the team makes camp near a tree, and the author builds a fire. At first, the flames terrify the young trainee dogs, but soon they get used to them and, like people, gaze into them. When the flames die away, they howl in sadness.
Another campfire attracts a deer who, chased by wolves, decides that a fire surrounded by dogs is a better fate than death by wolves. The wolves give up; the dogs are held back by chains; the deer escapes.
The weirdness of animals stands as proof that humans aren’t the only interesting beings on the planet. Animals’ quirky behavior also reminds us that Nature is vastly more interesting and filled with unique surprises than people assume.
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By Gary Paulsen
