Woodsong

“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.”

The author grew up with guns, bows, and arrows and lived primarily outdoors; sometimes, he hunted simply to feed himself. None of this bothers him until he witnesses a pack of wolves catch and devours a deer. At that moment, he understands that the fantasy we have about the wilderness is wrong and that the violence of nature is real and bloody.

“Wolves don’t know they are wolves. That’s a name we have put on them, something we have done. I do not know how wolves think of themselves, nor does anybody, but I did know and still know that it was wrong to think they should be the way I wanted them to be.”

As he watches the wolf pack eat a deer while it stands, still alive, he sees all at once that death in the wild is something so alien to most people’s experience that it can barely be imagined, much less judged. Animals do what they do, and pretending they don’t slaughter their prey—or protesting when they do—bespeaks a total misunderstanding of the reality of life in the wild.

“To Storm it was all as nothing. The blood, the anxiety I felt, the horror of it meant as little to Storm as the blood from the deer on the snow had meant to the wolves. It was part of his life and if he could obey the one drive, the drive to be in the team and pull, then nothing else mattered. And he did not die.”

Animals live following their life impulses; anything else they won’t do. Though Storm suffers from internal bleeding, as long as he’s conscious and with his team, he’ll insist on pulling the sled. His purpose comes first; all else is secondary, even his own suffering.

“I thought of the dogs. How they came back to help me, perhaps to save me. I knew that somewhere in the dogs, in their humor and the way they thought, they had great, old knowledge; they had something we had lost. And the dogs could teach me.”

Though he was injured and fell off his sled, his dog team returned to find him, and he survived the accident. One dog even gently licked the wound on his leg. Dogs are smarter than we believe, and perhaps they’re wiser than we know.

“Primarily the difference between people and animals is that people use fire. People create fire, and animals don’t. Oh, there are minor things—like cars and planes and all the other inventions we seem to have come up with. But in a wild state, the real difference is that we use controlled fire.”

Fire is a great and frightening thing that people can make, but other creatures can’t. Animals fear it; dogs do, too, at first, but even dogs stare into the flames, something they share in common with their humans. The author distrusts modern technology for how it distances people from the wisdom of the natural world; fire, at least, has been with humans since long before planes and cars, and it contains something natural, even spiritual, that metal and plastic lack.

“Kill him for what? For not killing me? For letting me know it is wrong to throw sticks at four-hundred-pound bears? For not hurting me, for not killing me, I should kill him? I lowered the rifle and ejected the shell and put the gun away. I hope Scarhead is still alive. For what he taught me, I hope he lives long and is very happy because I learned then—looking up at him while he made up his mind whether or not to end me—that when it is all boiled down I am nothing more and nothing less than any other animal in the woods.”

Humans who live deep in the wilderness must obey the laws of the woods, which are different from the laws of civilization. The large bear who rounds on Paulsen refrains from killing him, and he realizes that shooting the bear means he’d be punishing a wild creature for not hurting him.

“Russel—our fat old tom cat—was goobering around in the yard. He made the mistake of crouching and pretending to stalk one of the chicks. The frightened chick made one small distress peep and that’s all it took. I was standing in the driveway facing the woodpile and saw Hawk launch herself like a speckled red missile. She hit Russel in the back of the head so hard cat hair flew out in a circle. Then she hung on and rode him out of the yard, raking his sides like a professional bull rider.”

Hawk, the chicken, protects her broods with raptor-like vigilance and ferocity. Her merciless punishment of any who cross her reminds the reader that animals tame and wild have distinct personalities, feel passionately, and are capable of much more than most people assume.

“There is something about canoes; they do not cause fear. It is possible to paddle gently up to many wild animals and they simply stand and watch—this same thing happens often with dog teams. The silence is probably the cause, but there is grace to a canoe—or a dog team, or a sailboat (which whales allow close to them)—a gentle elegance that seems to fit much more into nature than the roar of an outboard or snowmobile. (Perhaps for that reason in many states it is illegal to hunt from a canoe—deemed unfair—[…].”

In this casual aside, the author manages to connect the beauty of nature, the quiet grace of simple human water transport, the contrasting noisy disturbance of motorized boats, and the conflict between modern humans and the natural world. He packs a great deal into three sentences, including his preference for wildness over mechanization and loveliness over power.

“We have had and been owned by many dogs since we started to run them.”

Paulsen expresses his love and respect for the dogs he has worked with over the years. He doesn’t think of them as his property or servants but as friends and allies. For him, the world of animals isn’t something to be tamed but to be revered.

“It is, of course, madness—a kind of channeled, focused madness. The Iditarod. The idea is that the musher will take a team and go from downtown Anchorage to downtown Nome, some eleven hundred plus miles across the Alaskan wilderness, over mountain ranges, up the Yukon River, out to the coast of the Bering Sea, and up along the coast and across parts of the sea ice to Nome. That is the idea.”

All of his dogsledding practice, all his experiences in the woods learning about the dangers and beauty of wildness—these prepare the author merely to attempt a challenge that goes way beyond anything he’s ever tried before. The Iditarod dares contestants to exceed their own limits of endurance, courage, and knowledge. They can’t finish unless they do so.

“I go up to the front of the team in the darkness and drag them around, realizing we are lost. My clothes have been ripped on tree limbs and my face is bleeding from cuts, and when I look back down the side of the mountain we have just climbed I see twenty-seven head lamps bobbing up the trail. Twenty-seven teams have taken our smell as the valid trail and are following us. Twenty-seven teams must be met head on in the narrow brush and passed and told to turn around. It is a nightmare.”

The race begins chaotically, and by night, the author already suffers injuries, pain, embarrassment, and delay. The first hours are miserable, and there are still two weeks or more to go.

“The dogs are magnificent. They are the true athletes of the Iditarod. The dogs continually cause wonder with their endurance, joy, and intelligence. But they have tremendous needs. They must be fed a snack every hour or so and three or more hot meals a day. Their shoulders must be rubbed every hour and they must be allowed to shake the lactic acid buildup out of their joints each hour. And their feet…God, their feet.”

The dogs run heroically. The drivers win or lose, but the dogs shine above all; the driver’s main job is to make sure they stay healthy. Booties for sore feet, ointment for frostbitten ears, water, time to rest, and a bit of affection help to replenish them.

“But nothing can prepare you for your first hallucinations in the race because they are not dreams, not something from sleep or delirium; the intensity of the race, the focused drive of it makes for a kind of exhaustion in the musher not found in training. The hallucinations seem to roar at you. They come while you are awake, come with your eyes open, and are completely real.”

The extreme stress of the Iditarod begins days before, during race preparation. Sleep-deprived and excited, the author and his team are a day and a half into the race when he sees flames shoot from the dogs’ feet. These mental events are expected, but they hit hard just the same. The hallucinations are an important sign of the enormity of the strain that the contestants must withstand.

“I am steeped in beauty. It is like going back ten, twelve thousand years, running over these mountains with a dog team. Like becoming a true human—a human before we became cluttered by civilization. Like going inside and becoming a cave painting.”

The real secret of this contest is that it ventures way out beyond civilization to test people in fundamental ways, tests of mettle and spirit that once were common to humans but have been lost in the freeways and high rises and TV screens of modern times. A land that takes people to their limits also rewards them with a beauty that’s deepened by its indifference to their fate. Aboard a sled lashed by sub-freezing winds, a person realizes that some things are vastly larger, more powerful, and perhaps more important than they are.

“[H]e relaxes and realizes he is hallucinating but as I leave I hear him say loudly again, ‘Get out of the sled.…’ And I think as we go that perhaps it is not real and I am hallucinating about a man having hallucinations and that in turn triggers the thought that perhaps all of it—the Burn, the race, the dogs, my life, all of it in the whole world is just a hallucination.”

The Iditarod isn’t merely a test of endurance; it’s a challenge to sanity. Exhausted and stressed beyond the breaking point, Paulsen ponders the possibility that reality itself may be an illusion. Ironically, he muses about philosophy while failing to distinguish between the real world and his worsening hallucinations.

“Dawn comes and we are in the interior of Alaska. So different, it is like another planet. No trees, only tundra and the long low hills and the jingle of the dogs’ collars and the whuffing of their breath as they trot and we cover the miles, the long miles across the interior over to the Yukon River.”

Alaska is huge; it has many faces. Part of the race’s adventure is the challenge of crossing different terrains. The teams navigate several of these, each with its own beauty and monotony and dangers, for hours at a time.

“It must be the same as going to the moon, crossing the interior of Alaska by dog team. After a time it seems the team isn’t moving, that the country, the tundra, the endless grass and shallow snow are rolling by beneath us and we are standing still—so unchanging is the country. Flat, gently rolling, it is stultifying.”

Like one heartless challenge after another, each region on the course contains its own special torment. The endlessly monotonous tundra gives drivers the feeling that they’re making no progress at all. Minds turn to mush; even hallucinations would be a relief.

“I cannot believe this man has flown out here with a wolf sitting in back of him just to get her bred by my dogs. ‘She’s in season,’ he offers. ‘The only problem is she’s killed three male dogs I’ve tried to breed her to.…’ ‘I’ll pass,’ I say, and he shrugs amiably, jumps into the plane, and takes off.”

Some events during the race seem surreal, but they’re not hallucinations. The man in the plane is simply following the race and looking for someone willing to take a chance with his dogs and a wolf. That he’s honest about the danger speaks not only to his odd integrity but to the sheer strangeness of the encounter. It’s one of those “only at the Iditarod” things that are hard to believe yet strangely appropriate to the uniquely unusual event.

“I cannot get enough air through my two wool masks so I pull them down and breathe straight into my mouth. I get enough air then, but the cold raw air freezes the sides of my throat and blood vessels burst and my throat generates mucus and soon I am choking on it. It is very hard to clear. I must stick a finger down my throat to help pull it out and when I throw it on the ice the wheel dogs turn around and eat it. This makes me throw up and they eat that as well and I spend the whole day and night running up the river hacking blood and mucus and vomiting and hallucinating.”

One of several grisly scenes from the book but by no means the worst; this episode nonetheless can represent all of them. Dogsledding and the wilderness itself have their bloody moments; it’s not merely an interesting world with bouts of pain but an astonishing one with moments of agony. The author is rigorously honest about all this; it’s part of his effort to clarify the vast range of experience available from Nature.

“I have changed, have moved back in time, have entered an altered state, a primitive state. At one point there is a long uphill grade—over a mile—and I lope alongside the sled easily, lightly, pushing gently to help the dogs. My rhythm, my movement, is the same as the dogs. We have the same flow across the tundra and I know then we will finish. We could run forever into the wind, across the short grass, run for all the time there has been and all the time there will be and I know it and the dogs know it.”

The pain and agony of days of sledding across rough, cold, dangerous landscapes cause a shift in the author’s attitude. He feels bonded to his dogs and to the world around him. The repetitive motions of travel transform his awareness into a trance-like, timeless sense of oneness.

“I am sitting in the fourth to the last checkpoint when the race ends. We still have two hundred or so miles to go, across part of the ice on Norton Sound, and it is completely over. They’re having their banquets and the winner is being paid and there is cheering and I still have four days to go to finish. And we do not care about winning or losing—only the dance counts.”

The joy of competing, the wonder and beauty of nature, the tests of endurance: These are what really matter. Others did it faster, but few can claim they got more out of this grand adventure.

“The beauty is, as through the whole race, staggering. The hills which would once have put me off with their steepness are full of light and game. Clouds of ptarmigan rise like giant white snowflakes into a bright sun in front of the dogs—sometimes two, three hundred of them. And the strange arctic hares that stand on their back legs to see better are all over the place. They seem to be people, especially in the twilight as evening comes and the edges of hallucinations start. I keep thinking there are people standing in back of bushes to watch us pass.”

When the pressure’s off, the beauty pours in. Paulsen and his dog team traverse easily the coastal hills along the Bering Sea, enjoying the ride. They know they’ll finish the course; the rest is a formality, and they can relax. The author’s fragmentary awareness of gorgeous scenery during the toughest stages of the race now opens up to a constantly receptive state, and, everywhere he looks, he sees loveliness.

“Horror stories abound about the Sound. Rumors. Somebody has gone through the ice and they found her team wandering alone. Somebody else went insane and is making big circles out on the ice but nobody wants to stop him because he will be disqualified if he is given help. Somebody was found dead on her sled.”

As elsewhere on the course, the author hears stories of dreadful mishaps, most exaggerated, but all of them compelling. The stories represent the contestants’ fears more than they describe any real tragedies.