Woodsong

Paulsen’s family lives with him in a cabin in the woods. Struggling to feed them, Paulsen gets a job hunting beaver for the State of Minnesota, which suffers from a major invasion of the creatures. He sets up a 20-mile trap line, but he must walk or ski it, and it’s not enough to make ends meet, so he acquires four dogs and a broken sled and, through trial and error, figures out how to work them.

As a beginner, he runs the sled during the day instead of the cooler nights, when the dogs are less likely to overheat. He begins to think he’s an expert. One frigid day, he decides to keep sledding into the night to get home. The hilly trail is heavy with snow, and the sled weighs in at 500 pounds, and he feeds them dry dog food, the worst thing to give sled dogs.

The first part of the night run is beautiful—ghostly white snow beneath the moon, the dogs exhaling clouds of breath, the trail winding through forests—but suddenly, one dog, Storm, squirts blood out his rear. Paulsen unhooks him and places him in the sled, but sled dogs have pulling in their nature, and Storm hates being excluded. He screams, twists, and squirms until he’s on the ground, where he promptly resumes pulling via his tie-down rope. Paulsen resets him on the sled, but Storm again stands up and resumes pulling. The author tries having him trot behind on a rope, but Storm immediately runs alongside the sled until the rope catches and he can pull again. Finally, Paulsen puts Storm back in his regular position, and the ride continues for seven hours while the author worries that Storm will die. They make it home; Storm has stopped bleeding and is fine.

As with the wolves and the deer, Paulsen realizes he “knew nothing about animals, understood nothing about the drives that make them work, knew nothing” (20).

Extreme cold, with temperatures greater than 40 to 60 below zero, can shatter steel, rupture blood vessels in the throat, freeze eyeballs, and break off fingers. But there is beauty as well: The air becomes clear, sounds are more intense, and ice glitters like diamonds.

The dogs live in a kennel area at home, each in a separate little house, each attached to a long chain. In summer, they pull a wheeled sled, but they can get bored, and their chief entertainments are the beef bones they receive.

One dog, Columbia, does something mischievous: He takes his bone, with some meat still on it, and pushes it out past the limit of his chain toward the house of another dog, Olaf, an aggressive, domineering dog. Columbia watches as Olaf strains toward the bone but just fails to reach it. Columbia makes a sound like laughter—“Heh, heh, heh…” (24)—and walks away.

Paulsen realizes that if a dog can do something that complicated, then so can a wolf, and perhaps so can most animals. He decides to stop trapping animals. The dogs, though, still want to run, so he maintains the trapline as a fiction, and he and the dogs visit it in the usual manner.

One winter, they explore a logging road down into a canyon and across a creek, but they reach the bottom too fast, and the sled swings out. Paulsen catches a knee on a snag, falls onto the icy creek, slides over a 20-foot frozen waterfall, and smacks his torn knee on the ice: “[…] nothing ever felt like landing on that knee. I don’t think I passed out so much as my brain simply exploded” (27).

Slowly he regains consciousness. Dog teams often pull sleds for miles after the driver falls off. Paulsen is far from civilization; he can’t walk on his bleeding leg. After some time, he sees his lead dog, Obeah, looking down at him from the top of the waterfall. The dog disappears; Paulsen hears noises and growling, and soon the team appears at his side. They all manage to return home. The author feels lovingly grateful, and he realizes his dogs have many lessons to teach him.

Sled dogs have remarkable stamina. On one run, he lets his dogs pull the sled for as long as they like. They pull for 17 hours and cover 175 miles. Their ways constantly surprise and inspire him.

He trains year-old dogs to pull sleds in preparation for an upcoming Iditarod sled race. One evening, they make camp, and Paulsen builds a small fire. The young dogs whine in terror, and Paulsen must calm them. Before long, they’re used to the flames and stare into them. When the fire dies away, the dogs sing in unison, howling sadly.

Another time, as he falls asleep next to his campfire, Paulsen’s dogs raise a racket, and he opens his eyes to see a large doe standing by the fire, staring at him, terror in her eyes. In the distance, a pack of brush wolves moves about, agitated, eyeing the camp and the deer but afraid to confront the human and the fire. Desperate, the doe has made the “mad gamble” (35) of risking fire and dogs instead of wolves. The doe remains quietly in place for half an hour, waiting for the wolves to leave; then, abruptly, she runs off.

Bears are a threat, especially in the spring, when they awaken hungry from hibernation. They sometimes steal the dogs’ food and can kill a dog with a swipe of their paw. Most of the time, they don’t bother the many yard animals—dogs, cats, goats, chickens, ducks, geese—and Paulsen’s family becomes used to them.

One day in July, the author burns a load of food packaging in an outdoor fenced enclosure. A large bear, “Scarhead,” smelling the burning grease, arrives, and damages the enclosure in search of any meat. Paulsen throws a stick at Scarhead, who turns, rises up, looms over the terrified man, and stares at him. Finally, he drops back down and resumes his quest. The author rushes inside, grabs his rifle, and runs back. He aims at the bear, then stops. He asks himself, “Kill him for what?” (41). Paulsen had done something foolish; Scarhead could have killed him but didn’t. He lowers the weapon.

During one spring run on a wheeled sled, the team finds a dead grouse at a road crossing; instantly, the dogs eat it. Paulsen walks back, finds the grouse’s nest of eggs, and brings the eggs home, where he puts them in the nest of a small “banty” hen that fiercely protects her broods. The baby grouse hatch and bond to the hen, who raises them as her own. The grouse grow and begin to fly, but, for a while at least, they return to their adopted mom when she calls them.

The hen takes to sitting atop a tall woodpile, where she monitors the yard and chases anything that threatens her chicks. They name her “Hawk” because she watches like one. One house cat tries to stalk a chick, and the mother zooms down, strikes the cat in the head, and rides it all the way out of the yard.

With so many chicks under Hawk’s watchful eye, the yard becomes a “war zone” (46). Paulsen’s wife and son are attacked, along with two of their house dogs; his wife starts to wear a helmet outside. A fox grabs a chick, but Hawk nails him in the back of the head, and the fox spits out the chick. Everyone walks cautiously when Hawk sits on the woodpile.

Strange mysteries happen in the woods. While feeding cookie crumbs to a chipmunk, the author watches in horror as a red squirrel rushes forward, kills the chipmunk, drags it away, and starts to eat it. Red squirrels eat pine nuts, not mammals.

Late one autumn night, Paulsen’s headlamp goes out, and the dogs and wheeled sled continue through the woods, branches slashing at him, until the team suddenly halts. Ahead shines an eerie greenish light. Slowly they approach the ghostly glow until they realize the light comes from a tree stump. It turns out stumps sometimes absorb phosphorus from the ground, which collects sunlight and radiates it during the night.

In winter, foxes catch grouse in their snow caves. The author comes upon a snowy scene with feathers and other signs of a kill, except there are no fox tracks entering or leaving the area. An hour’s inspection offers no clues.

Cedar waxwing birds always arrive early in spring, when there are only bad-tasting high-bush cranberries to eat. The birds land in a tree, arrange themselves in rows, and the lead bird plucks a berry and passes it down the rows to the birds until every waxwing has a berry. All at the same time, they eat the berries. Then they repeat the process.

Twice, while in a canoe, the author has wonderful encounters with deer. The first time, he and a city friend and his toddler son fish near the shore, and a fawn approaches; the child reaches out and touches its nose. The second time, while canoeing down a quiet river, his arms badly bitten by horseflies, he sees a deer, similarly tormented, leap into the river to relieve itself of the flies on its head and ears. The deer surfaces, stares angrily at him, then realizes he’s a human, and runs away.

Thinking these warm thoughts one cold night on a sled run, he notices the dogs have slowed down. They stop nervously. Just ahead stands a doe. Deer do not stand that close to dogs, and dogs don’t whimper around deer. Paulsen walks forward until he can touch the deer: It’s dead, completely frozen, yet standing up. Perhaps it was some kind of paralysis. The dogs want to get away, and they angle quickly around the body and off into the night.

One house dog, Fred, impregnates several sled dogs before being neutered. He roams the ranch freely, stealing food from the other dogs and burying it. His weight balloons from 40 pounds to 130; The Paulsens put him on a diet, but he keeps retrieving buried food and, later, steals vegetables from the garden. Finally, his food is controlled, and Fred is taken for long walks, so he loses weight, but he becomes testy. He refuses to come when called, stops guarding the house, and gets into fights with the electric fence. He also bites Paulsen, slicing his knee open. The author learns a lot about canine anger.

Lead dogs tend to know more than the driver does, but, early in his dogsled career, Paulsen thinks he knows the trails better, and he constantly overrides his lead dog, Cookie, especially in stormy conditions. One day, on a ridge, he forces her to go the way he wants. She obliges: “If I just couldn’t resist being stupid, then she figured I had it coming” (69), and Cookie leads the sled over a cliff. They land in a heap. Paulsen re-loads the sled and untangles the dogs, who let him do it but won’t look at him. When he signals to start up, the dogs lie down. He can’t budge them; they sleep for 18 hours.

Storm teaches him the most about dogs. Storm is big, with a bear-like face and comically rounded ears; he likes to play jokes, like hiding things from Paulsen or snorting into another dog’s ear during a run. On one winter ride, the author stops the sled and removes his hat while repairing a dog’s harness. The hat disappears, and only by luck does he find it, neatly buried, snow smoothed over it, next to where Storm sits.

Storm also watches as the sled is loaded and complains if it looks too heavy. While sledding, the dog develops the habit of tearing a small branch from a tree and holding it in his mouth. Paulsen takes the stick, examines it, nods, and gives it back; it becomes a tradition. If things are not going well—if, for example, the dogs are being driven too hard—at a rest stop, Storm will drop the stick and refuse to pick it up. The stick becomes a form of communication.

When he gets older, Storm trains young dogs; when really old, he rejects an offer to live in the house but stays instead near the kennel, always with a stick that he presents to Paulsen. Blind and slightly addled, Storm gets into tussles with some young dogs brought in, so the author puts him on a chain to keep him from injury while he’s away. He returns to hear the dogs singing a low, moaning “death song” (79) and finds Storm lying on the ground, deceased, his chain tangled around his dog house, marks from his claws on the ground where he tried to position himself to face east, as so many animals do when they die. In his mouth is a stick.

On a long, bitterly cold, and windy run, Paulsen digs snow caves for the dogs, and they wait out the gale until he becomes violently ill. A very nice Arctic Native—the author calls him the “Eskimo man” (82)—helps him set up the dogs and sled for the next leg. Paulsen is too sick to stand, and he lies in the sled; the man keeps reappearing and untangles the dogs when they get snow-drifted or fight. Finally, he realizes they’re back home; his wife helps him unhook the dogs. The helpful man, he decides, is a hallucination. He doesn’t see him again until he enters the Iditarod race.