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.
Index of Terms
Blood
Blood recurs as a lesson to the wise: Nature is bloody, not tidy; bleeding sometimes is a cost of achievement; accepting bloodiness is a step toward understanding the wilderness in all its complexity. The author witnesses a wolf pack’s bloody slaying of a doe, and he has a major epiphany about the wilderness—that it can be messy and awful in death but beautiful in life, yet both life and death are the same to the wilderness. Blood spilled is a harbinger of death; in the book, blood symbolizes death, acceptance of death, and the liberation that such understanding brings.
Dogs
Central to the story are dogs, the pullers of sleds, and teachers of wisdom to the author. Wherever it wanders, the story always swings back to them. The word “dog” occurs 357 times in a book of 133 pages. From dogs, the author learns about courage, determination, humor, anger, loyalty, and love. He’s inspired by the dogs and returns their loving friendship in kind.
Hallucinations
When the physical demands of sledding overpower a driver, that person can begin to see things that aren’t there. Hallucinations are a common occurrence among mushers during the Iditarod race. Those illusions, being entirely imaginary and limited to the mind of the witness, naturally bespeak the thoughts and feelings of the person hallucinating. For some, including the author, a chief mirage is a person sitting on a sled. The author also sees an imaginary Arctic Native man who, every time the team is in deep trouble, appears to put things right and save the day. Paulsen writes, “The man with no name was there and he smiled peacefully and quietly and untangled the dogs with his gentle competence and pulled them out straight and got them going again” (83). The hallucinations represent how the mind, pushed to extremes, tries to rewrite reality until it veers back toward safety and normality.
Sled
The sled is the reason there are sled dogs. It’s often filled with provisions or, sometimes, with the products of work, but, strangely, it’s not the sled that matters. What matters is the relationship between driver and dogs. For a time, the author runs a sledding route simply to keep his dogs in training. In the story, the sled is always there, the thing to be pulled, the excuse for the great activity of dogsledding. Central to the purpose of each trip but otherwise incidental, the sled sometimes causes problems, but it rarely gives happiness; that comes from the dogs who pull it and the driver they work with.
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