Woodsong

Published in 1991, the adventure biography Woodsong recounts novelist Gary Paulsen’s experiences as a dogsled driver, including his participation in the Iditarod race across Alaska. He describes the hard-won lessons he learns, the strange and wondrous things he witnesses, and the love and admiration he feels for the dogs he trains with.

Three-time Newbury Honor winner Paulsen wrote more than 200 works, most of them for middle-grade and young adult readers. His books often tell coming-of-age survival adventures. Woodsong describes many incidents that taught him the true meaning of wilderness.

The 2012 ebook edition forms the basis for this study guide. Readers are warned that some episodes in the story contain extreme violence involving wild animals.

Summary

Author Gary Paulsen lives an outdoor life, including lots of hunting, until age 40, when he witnesses a pack of wolves attack a deer and begin to devour it while it’s still standing. He realizes he doesn’t really understand the wilderness.

Paulsen begins a sledding career in Minnesota after the state hires him to catch beavers that swarm through the region and cause havoc. He learns dogsledding by doing; along the way, he makes painful mistakes and discovers profound lessons from nature. The deer’s bloody death convinces him to quit his hunting activities, and his dogs exhibit so much intelligence that he realizes other animals are also smart. He quits his beaver-trapping job, but he continues sledding.

He feeds his dogs the wrong food, which causes one, Storm, to bleed internally during a run. Still, despite attempts to put the dog in the sled, he can’t get Storm to stop wriggling to the ground and continuing to pull. The dog survives nicely, and Paulsen learns a lesson about canine determination.

On another run, he’s injured, falls off the sled, and can’t walk. Often, dog teams run for miles after losing their drivers, but his lead dog, Obeah, turns the team around, and they find Paulsen. He realizes that dogs, and perhaps all animals, have feelings and loyalties humans rarely consider.

Dogs howl together in a variety of ways that Paulsen calls songs. One night, a group of young trainee dogs becomes terrified when the author builds a fire. He calms them, and they learn to enjoy watching the flames so much that they sing a sad song together when the fire dies down.

Bears often visit his ranch, sometimes stealing the dogs’ food. One bear damages an outdoor fireplace, and the author, annoyed, throws a stick at the creature, who rises up on his hind legs and towers over Paulsen but decides not to kill him. Paulsen retrieves his rifle, intending to shoot the bear, but he realizes he’d be killing a wild creature who spared him despite his foolishness.

Another sort of terror takes the form of a small hen named Hawk. She sits atop a woodpile, standing watch over her broods and attacking anyone or anything who comes near them. People, house dogs, the family cat, and an invading fox get struck from behind when they dare to wander too close; often, it’s risky even to cross the yard. The author discovers a nest of grouse eggs after their mother dies; he places the eggs in Hawk’s nest, and she raises them as her own. For a time after they’ve learned to fly, they still assemble around her when she calls to them.

The woods host many strange mysteries. A red squirrel kills and eats a chipmunk; an eerie green glow lights the nighttime trail; a fox catches and consumes a grouse but leaves no snow prints. A fawn touches its nose to a toddler’s outstretched hand. A deer stands stock still in the middle of a winter’s night, dead and frozen solid.

The dogs teach the author many things. One leader, Cookie, knows the roads better than a human does, but Paulsen forces her to go a different way, and she obliges, leading the team off a cliff. He untangles the mess, but the dogs refuse to move for 18 hours. Storm uses a stick to communicate: he always has one in his mouth unless the sled team is being over-taxed, whereupon he drops the stick and refuses to pick it up. Even in old age and death, Storm teaches the author: Storm’s chain becomes tangled around his house, and he digs in the ground, trying to position himself to face east, as do many animals.

Caught in a freezing windstorm with his sled team, the author becomes severely ill, and a kindly Arctic Native helps save his life. He later realizes that the man was a hallucination. It’s a preview of many hallucinations to come when he takes his team on the Iditarod race.

The race begins in Anchorage, where news teams cover it, but the actual race starts 40 miles away, beyond a barricading highway. The first night, Paulsen and his team are stopped by a moose, wander lost up a side canyon, and fight exhaustion. At the first checkpoints, there’s nowhere to rest, and the dogs are too agitated to sleep. Paulsen hallucinates a man on his sled, rivers that aren’t there, and other illusions. He encounters mushers arguing with similarly unreal passengers.

They climb over the Alaska Range, the highest in North America, and scramble down the other side, nearly tipping off into a ravine. Several times, he barely hangs onto the sled. Despite the problems, Paulsen is enraptured by the gorgeous mountain scenery. They then cross a bleak plane called the Burn, where a forest once went up in flames, followed by hours traveling through monotonous tundra.

The longest leg of the race is the run up the frozen Yukon River under a fiercely cold headwind that reaches minus-50 degrees and more. Paulsen’s windpipe is damaged by the cold, and he spits out bloody phlegm for hours. Some checkpoints offer food; at one, the author eats too much moose chili and later becomes violently ill.

The team reaches the coast of the Bering Sea, where Paulsen learns the race has already been won. Tension gone, he and his team relax and enjoy several days of travel, some of it across frozen bays, until they near Nome. With the destination in sight, Paulsen suddenly wants to turn the team around and go back—the race seems so impossible that completing it feels somehow wrong. He also doesn’t want the adventure to end.

At last, he and his sled team cross the finish line. He hugs his wife, son, and each of his dogs. Town officials greet him, and Paulsen surprises himself by telling the mayor that he’ll return to run the race again.