Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod

“Each dog had made a bed, scratching down through the snow to the grass beneath and then digging up the grass to make it fluffy and warm.”

Paulsen often refers to the human-like habits of the dogs. He even notes that one of the dogs is fussy about making its bed just right.

“I had thoughts of ghost dogs, dream dogs, vision dogs—dogs I’d read about in books on ancient dog runners, before history knew of dog runners […].”

Paulsen thinks he is dreaming or hallucinating when he sees nine dogs near the campfire instead of the eight canines he brought there with him. The extra dog turns out to be a coyote.

“Wild things—wolves, bear, coyotes—all have a way of life that takes man into consideration, especially when it concerns fear of death, but they do not value man as part of their living equation.”

After a coyote hangs out with the dogs for a while and then goes off on her own, Paulsen comments on the difference between dogs, who have allied with humans for millennia, and wild animals.

“I am different. I see things the way they see them.”

The “they” Paulsen refers to here are the dogs. The quote shows the beginnings of Paulsen’s transformation to a dog state of mind. He says this to Ruth at the end of Chapter 1 when he decides to run the Iditarod.

“Right then I was probably one of the least qualified dog drivers on the entire planet to go up and run the Iditarod.”

Paulsen has this moment of self-doubt right after he tells his wife that he plans to run the Iditarod. He admits to a lack of knowledge about dog-sled racing and the Iditarod race several other times in the book, but his determination to learn and his openness toward listening to others’ experiences pay off for him in the long run.

“Sweet dogs, sour dogs, dogs that wagged and bit at the same time, dogs that wouldn’t be happy unless they had a finger to eat, dogs that just lay down and looked at you when you harnessed them, dogs that loved to run, hated to run, dogs that made war, dogs that gave up and some, rare ones, who never, ever did.”

Paulsen writes this in the beginning of the book when he is searching for more dogs to run the race. It shows his knowledge of diverse dog personalities, which become important as the book progresses. The repetition of the word “dogs” emphasizes how important the canines have become in Paulsen’s life. In the book, he states that the race is really all about the dogs, not the people.

“I once left the yard with wooden matches in my pocket and had them ignite as I was being dragged past the door of the house, giving me the semblance of a meteorite.”

Training for the Iditarod takes its toll on Paulsen’s body. His homemade rigs for summer training often result in ripped clothing and a bruised body, but the dogs have a blast.

“This time I didn’t go away and it altered the way they saw me, felt about me, thought of me and my actions, and changed the way I thought as well—started me thinking right.”

Paulsen describes the dogs’ reaction to his sleeping in the kennel with them. Moving in with the dogs is a bonding experience.

“Sleep died early. Before the race, before the starting chutes, before Anchorage, and before even Alaska, sleep died.”

Losing sleep is just one of the personal sacrifices that Paulsen makes to run the dogs and enter the Iditarod race. He also mentions going broke more than once.

“Before getting to Alaska, in the town of Fort Nelson, British Columbia, it was evident I was going to be broke when we got there and that we would not be able to run the race.”

Paulsen sacrifices financial stability to maintain his beloved outdoor lifestyle and to pursue his dream of running the Iditarod. He is fortunate to have donors helping him.

“It is almost impossible to articulate the race as a whole. It can be broken down into sections, days, hours, horrors, joys, checkpoints, winds, nights, colds, waters, ices, deaths, tragedies, small and large courages.”

Paulsen uses a mix of negative and positive nouns here to capture both the perilous peaks and the joyous moments of the race. The use of amplification—a sentence stuffed with words and information—conveys the overwhelming experience of the race.

“Alaska truly is wonderfully, viciously, terrifyingly, and joyously extreme.”

Paulsen’s use of contradictory adverbs reflects the complexity of the state. During the race, he witnesses extreme temperatures, treacherous terrain, but also beautiful sunrises and majestic mountains. The sentence amplifies the vastness of the Alaska experience.

“Instead she was gazing over my shoulder at the sun coming through the mountains, and she smiled.”

Paulsen often describes Cookie, the lead dog in his team, as behaving like a person, including smiling. Her intelligence bails Paulsen and the team out of a jam on more than one occasion.

“Everything they were, all the ages since their time began, the instincts of countless eons of wolves coursing after herds of bison and caribou were still there, caught in genetic strands, and they came to the fore and the dogs went berserk with it.”

Paulsen explains the sled dogs’ instinctual love of running. In this scene, they are raring to go right before the race starts in Anchorage.

“I had time to think the word moose. And that was it. It was on me. A cow of five or six hundred pounds, a dark hole in the trees at the side of the trail that caught no light, didn’t seem to have form, detached itself from the background and ran over me like a train.”

The moose attack is just one of several times wild animals pop up and surprise Paulsen and his dog team. They also encounter a beaver, a rabbit, a coyote, a deer, buffaloes, and a herd of caribou. These incidents highlight the unpredictability of nature.

“I was, consequently, in a trance state, my eyes open but my brain most definitely turned off, and I started past the checkpoint, would have passed except that Cookie took over and turned on a side trail at the last moment to bring us in to the checkpoint and a pile of food bags waiting for us.”

Paulsen relies on his lead dog’s sense of direction. Sometimes Cookie can see better than he can back in the sled with the dogs blocking his vision.

“The Burn fried me mentally and destroyed me physically. Without a snow cushion for the sled the jarring of the ground was brutal—like downhill skiing in bad moguls for 36 hours straight.”

Paulsen’s body takes a beating in the Burn—a 100-mile-stretch of burned-out brush where the wind blows constantly. A veteran musher warns him that it is “maybe the third hardest” part of the race (130).

“To do that, I thought—to be able to do that to a friend, a close friend who has pulled you halfway across Alaska and wants only to love and be loved and to pull and see the next hill and is now gone. Killed. Murdered.”

This passage is a grim reminder that not every musher shares Paulsen’s love and respect for the dogs. Paulsen also mentions historical mistreatment of dogs during Antarctica expeditions and on the Alaskan freight trail that supplied miners and prospectors.

 “Iditarod is now nothing but a building half caved in. The word means ‘a distant place’ in Ingalik […].”

The place that the race is named after is now a ghost town. However, the word’s meaning captures the essence of the race.

“Cold came at me from everywhere. Any seam, any crack, any opening and I could feel jets of it, needles of it, deadly cutting edges of ice, worse than ice, absolute cold coming in.”

Paulsen uses metaphors to describe the full-body experience of the Yukon River Valley, where he and the team endured temperatures as low as 60 below zero. The river and the wind combine to create the unbearable conditions. When the sun goes down, it’s like a “hammer blow.”

“I had changed, re-formed. I had gained knowledge that I didn’t understand. I reflexively knew where the wind would be worst on a hill, knew where to watch for moose, knew in my mind the shoulder rhythms of trotting and running dogs and what it meant when they changed.”

This passage, which appears near the end of the book, shows Paulsen’s transformation from a stumbling novice to a real musher with new instincts about the wilderness. The self-doubt that he exhibited in the early part of the book is gone. Despite all the hardships, Paulsen is now openly embracing his new life with the dogs.

“You have become one of them,” he said. “A dog. You pace, you look out, you move…like a dog.”

Throughout the book, Paulsen describes his “becoming dog.” He eventually eats dog food and uses dog ointment. However, the old man in Unalakleet who makes this comment confirms Paulsen’s new identity. He is basically confirming that Paulsen is now a true dog-sled runner. He even invites Paulsen to live in his village. 

“The race is relentless; no part of it acknowledges any other part. If it is bad on the Yukon it is not good on the Sound, but can be bad again and still worse yet on the run from Koyuk to Nome.”

Mushers can never let their guard down on the trail because when they think it can’t get any more difficult or dangerous, it does. Paulsen points out that mushers have even “scratched fifty miles from Nome” (249).