Woodsong

The rising sun lights the giant Alaska Range before them. The ground slopes gently upward toward the massifs. After dark, they arrive at a noisy checkpoint. Paulsen tries to rest his team, but the noise and other dogs keep them agitated. They continue on.

He starts to hallucinate, seeing flames shooting from his dogs’ feet. Hallucinations are expected, along with frostbite and other symptoms, but it rattles him just the same. Rivers appear that aren’t there; a man in a trench coat sits on his sled for a while, lecturing him about education grants. He yells at the man. In response, “the dogs stop and look back at me and of course I am alone” (97).

At dawn, the air is 50 degrees below zero; they finally rest.

The Alaska Range is the highest in North America, and the sleds must cross it. Four checkpoints later, they’re above timberline, and Paulsen has given up all hope of finishing near the head of the racers. Exhausted but exhilarated, he revels in the beauty of the land. As the team rests, he closes his eyes for a moment and sleeps for four hours.

Teams must descend through an icy river gorge; on the way down, bouncing and careening around boulders, Paulsen ties one hand to the sled. A rough spot on the trail knocks him off the sled, and, hanging by his hand, he’s dragged, bouncing, down the slope. Near the bottom, another driver grabs his team and stops them from plunging into a ravine. They make it to the next checkpoint.

This day is a mandatory rest period. Around the checkpoint cabin are mountains that climb straight up into the sky “like a cathedral” (103). When it’s time to go, the well-rested dogs are so excited to take off that they break the anchor rope and lose their snow hook.

Twice in a densely forested part of the trail, Paulsen is knocked off the sled by tree branches; both times, he scrambles back on. They travel on a frozen river and up over an icebound waterfall, the author hanging on for dear life. Finally, they reach the dreaded Burn.

The Burn is a vast stretch of land, this year entirely without snow. It’s where a fire took out the forest, and fallen tree trunks crisscross the trail so that Paulsen must constantly stop to saw away at the impeding logs. This lets the dogs rest, and they pull the sled quickly over the bare ground, bouncing and jangling the driver.

Once again, the man in the trench coat sits on the sled. The team passes another team whose driver yells at his sled, telling his invisible person to get out. The author wonders if the yelling man is a hallucination, or perhaps his entire life is a hallucination. He sees a bull buffalo ahead on the trail, staring down his lead dog, and he thinks the buffalo is a mirage, but the dogs have stopped, so they see it, too. They move carefully around the buffalo and continue.

The wind kicks up, it starts to snow, and today’s lead dog, Wilson, gets lost. He’s a wonderful animal but “dumber than a walnut” (107), and he leads the team 30 miles astray. They stop, and suddenly Paulsen sees the Inuit man, who gets the dogs turned around, and they head back. The hours go by; “each time I hesitate he shows up next to the team and waves me on” (109). They make it to the next checkpoint cabin. The author wants to thank the man who saved them, but he is nowhere to be found.

Some hours after the checkpoint, the team encounters a bar out in the brush. A man comes forward and offers Paulsen a beer; he doesn’t drink, so the man gives him a soda and tosses three more onto the sled. Paulsen doesn’t see that gift, which rolls to the bottom of the sled, where the cans freeze and burst. The soda ice later thaws and drenches the dog booties, which later freeze again. When Wilson has a paw problem, Paulsen must thaw out a bootie for him. Wilson likes the smell, and he takes to running on three legs while sucking at the bootie.

At the next checkpoint, the author receives a cup of cocoa that tastes unbelievably delicious. That night, they travel over “long hills like ocean swells” (111), and he hallucinates crowds of people cheering him on. In the morning, they travel across hours of monotonous, treeless tundra on their way to the Yukon River.

The tundra bores everyone. While running, Wilson keeps falling asleep from boredom and falling over. Paulsen learns to watch for Wilson’s back to begin weaving and calls out, “Willy?” which awakens the dog. He does this every 40 yards all night, even while passing other teams.

In the morning, they rest at an abandoned cabin, where another driver has a fire going in the stove. The musher says one team passed him while its driver was calling out for someone named “Willy.” Paulsen denies knowing about it.

The team rests next to a frozen river by the ghost town of Iditarod. A plane lands there; the pilot asks Paulsen if he’ll breed his large dogs with the pilot’s pet female wolf, who sits in the rear seat of the plane, her face muzzled. The pilot admits that, so far, his wolf has killed three dogs that tried to mate with her. Paulsen politely turns him down; the pilot flies away. It’s not a hallucination: The plane leaves ski marks in the snow.

Rookie racers begin to dump gear to save weight. One of Paulsen’s dogs stops eating the meat he provides, but he’ll eat the author’s meat patties; Paulsen finds butter at checkpoints and consumes a lot of that. At one stop, the local children serve moose chili; he eats 19 bowlfuls. As the team begins its run up the Yukon River, Paulsen thinks he’s “going to die of gastric distress” (117).

The Yukon run is 180 miles against a bone-chilling headwind, “the cursed, cutting, tearing, soul-cold wind” (119). The author dons all his clothing, but it doesn’t help. The team travels on the river’s icy surface, which also hosts snowmobiles zooming from one village to the next. The following day, they manage to rest in the lee of an island; a faint sun warms his face.

It’s so cold during the second day on the Yukon River that the author alternates running behind the sled and resting just to keep warm. He has trouble breathing through his doubly masked face, so he tries pulling them down to breathe, but the air is so cold it freezes his throat and blood vessels burst. He spits out mucous-covered blood, which the dogs promptly eat. This makes him nauseous, and he vomits; the dogs consume that, too. For a day and a night, this continues, along with hallucinations.

Near the final river checkpoint, Paulsen notices a famous cemetery on a hill; the crosses seem to welcome him.

The next 90 miles are a long downhill run toward the Bering Sea. The author finds himself immersed in a sense of oneness with his dogs and with the natural world; it’s a primitive, timeless feeling.

That night, they reach a village on the shore, where an Indigenous American receives him and shelters him for the night. In his appearance and gentle actions, the man reminds him of the Inuit man of his hallucinations.

At one of the final checkpoints, the author learns that the race has been won. It’s over; the pressure is off. He and his dogs enjoy the next leg; all are relaxed; Paulsen sees beauty everywhere. At one point, the dogs chase a hare; it gets away, and they arc back onto the trail. 

On the next leg, they must cross the ice-bound sea at Norton Sound, a large bay about 60 miles across. Rumors persist of teams going in circles, being lost at sea, or drowned beneath the ice. The rumors are imaginative but mostly not real.

Travel across the ice is easy and fun. During rests, the dogs play with one another. That night, they see the lights of the coastal checkpoint and pick up the pace, but it’s still 30 miles away, and they slow to a trot.

At the checkpoint, a boy tries to help pull the dogs toward the house where they’ll stay but tangles them, and Paulsen must lift him away before the dogs injure him. The boy admits that he wants to learn about sledding; Paulsen thinks, “I am stunned that an Eskimo boy on the Bering Sea would have to ask someone from Minnesota about dogs” (129). Inside, the host family is, once again, as kind and gentle as the man in his hallucinations. They ask him about his journey, but he can’t say a lot—somehow, he has lost some of his ability to speak—and he sleeps on the beach with his dogs.

At dawn, another musher arrives and plays with his own dogs, rolling around with them on the ground. Then he puts sweaters on the dogs so they can sleep warmly. The author is glad to have seen all this.

Another short coastal run is followed by a final sea-ice crossing. The wind blows from behind, and the sled tends to catch up with the dogs, so Paulsen must apply the brake constantly. After the checkpoint, they travel 40 miles of beachfront toward Nome, mainly on the sea ice because winds have driven snow from the land. The dogs are antsy: They sense the destination ahead.

Paulsen sees Nome in the distance, and suddenly he wants to turn back. This race isn’t possible; it can’t be done. Even if it can, he doesn’t want it to end. He’s about to turn the team around when he hears a familiar voice that breaks the spell: His wife calls to him; she’s been brought out on a Jeep to greet him early. The team continues into Nome.

As they approach the finish line, leader Cookie stops, afraid of the crowd of people, and Paulsen must drag her over the line to finish the race. The author starts to cry as he hugs his wife, his son, and each of his dogs. He greets the mayor and tells him something he never expected to say: “We’ll be back to run it again” (132).