Gary Paulsen - Woodsong

WOODSONG

Also by Gary Paulsen

Dancing Carl

Dogsong

Hatchet

Sentries

Tracker

SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Childrens Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1990 by Gary Paulsen

Illustrations copyright 1990 by Ruth Wright Paulsen

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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Also available in a Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition

First Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers ebook edition May 2012

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Paulsen, Gary.
Woodsong/by Gary Paulsen
p. cm.
Illustrated by Ruth Wright Paulsen.

Summary: For a rugged outdoor man and his family, life in northern Minnesota is an adventure involving wolves, deer, and sled dogs. Includes an account of the authors first Iditarod, a doglsed race across Alaska.

1. Outdoor lifeMinnesotaJuvenile literature. 2. DogsleddingMinnesotaJuvenile literature. 3. Sled dogsMinnesotaJuvenile literature 4. MinnesotaSocial life and customsJuvenile literature 5. Paulsen, GaryHomes and hauntsMinnesotaJuvenile literature. 6. MinnesotaBiographyJuvenile literature 7. Iditarod Train Sled Dog Race, Alaska [1. Outdoor lifeMinnesota 2. Sled dogs. 3. Sled dog racing. 4. Paulsen, Gary.]
I. Paulsen, Ruth Wright, ill. II. Title. F610P38 1990
796.5092dc20 89-70835 CIP AC
ISBN-13: 978-0-02-770221-7 (hc.)
ISBN-10: 0-02-770221-9 (hc.)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-3939-9 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-4169-3939-3 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4424-6714-9 (eBook)

Contents

'This Side of Wild' Excerpt

This book is dedicated to Cookie,
who died on September 10,1989.

Her soul is on the ravens wing.

I UNDERSTOOD almost nothing about the woods until it was nearly too late. And that is strange because my ignorance was based on knowledge.

Most of my life it seems Ive been in the forest or on the sea. Most of my time, sleeping and waking, has been spent outside, in close contact with what we now call the environment, what my uncles used to call, simply, the woods.

We hunted. Small and large game. We hunted and killed and though I think now that it is wrong to hunt and kill, at the time I did not think this and I spent virtually all my time hunting.

And learned nothing.

Perhaps the greatest paradox about understanding the woods is that so many who enjoy it, or seem to enjoy it, spend most of their time trying to kill parts of it.

Yet, it was a hunter, a wild one, and an act of almost unbelievable violence that led me to try to understand all of it, and to try to learn from it without destroying it.

I lived in innocence for a long time. I believed in the fairy-tale version of the forest until I was close to forty years old.

Gulled by Disney and others, I believed Bambi always got out of the fire. Nothing ever really got hurt. Though I hunted and killed it was always somehow clean and removed from reality. I killed yet thought that every story had a happy ending.

Until a December morning

I was running a dog team around the side of a large lake, just starting out on my trapline. It was early winter and the ice on the lake wasnt thick enough to support the sled and team or I would have gone across the middle. There was a rough trail around the edge of the lake and I was running a fresh eight-dog team so the small loop, which added five or so miles, presented no great difficulty.

It was a grandly beautiful winter morning. The temperature was perhaps ten below, with a bright sun that shone through ice crystals in the air so that everything seemed to sparkle. The dogs were working evenly, the gangline up through the middle of them thrumming with the rhythm it has when they are working in perfect tandem. We skirted the lake, which lay below and to the right. To the left and rising higher were willows and brush, which made something like a wall next to the trail.

The dogs were still running at a lope, though we had come over seven miles, and I was full of them; my life was full of them. We were, as it happens sometimes, dancing with winter. I could not help smiling, just smiling idiotically at the grandness of it. Part of the chant of an ancient Navajo prayer rolled through my mind:

Beauty above me
Beauty below me
Beauty before me

That is how I felt then and frequently still feel when I am running dogs. I was in and of beauty and at that precise moment a doe, a white-tailed deer, exploded out of some willows on the left side of the team, heading down the bank toward the lake.

The snow alongside the trail was about two feet deep and powdery and it followed her in a white shower that covered everything. She literally flew over the lead dog who was a big, white, wolfy-looking male named Dollar. He was so surprised that he dropped, ducked, for part of an instant, then rosealmost like a rock skipping on the trailand continued running. We were moving so fast and the deer was moving so fast that within a second or two we were several yards past where it had happened and yet everything seemed suspended in slow motion.

Above all, in the deer, was the stink of fear. Even in that split part of a second, it could be smelled. It could be seen. The does eyes were so wide they seemed to come out of her head. Her mouth was jacked open and her tongue hung out to the side. Her jaw and neck were covered with spit, and she stunk of fear.

Dogs smell fear at once but I have not always been able to, even when I was afraid. There is something coppery about it, a metallic smell mixed with the smell of urine and feces, when something, when somebody, is afraid. No, not just afraid but ripped with fear, and it was on the doe.