57 pages • 1 hour read
Gary PaulsenWinterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod
Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Nature as Challenger and Comforter
Winterdance is clearly a man-against-nature story, but Paulsen approaches the classic theme from a different perspective. Nature inspires and comforts Paulsen as much as it challenges and threatens him. In fact, in the first chapter, he explains how his love of nature changes his motivation for running the dogs from practical purposes, such as gathering firewood, to the sheer joy of it: “But the beauty of the woods, the incredible joy of it is too alluring to be ignored, and I could not stand to be away from it—indeed, still can’t—and so I ran dogs simply to run dogs; to be in and part of the forest, the woods” (25).
Paulsen frequently refers to the beauty of sunrises, such as in this passage when the team is crossing the harsh interior of Alaska: “The sun rose to our right rear and splashed a new gold light across the barren ground and made it glow. The dogs seemed to like the light and picked up the speed a bit” (204). In fact, Paulsen contrasts light and dark images throughout the story, with light representing calm and a reprieve from nature’s dangers and dark signaling the renewed perils of the trail. Paulsen illustrates the stark difference between day and night in the wilderness in this passage he writes about the Yukon: “As I happened, I didn’t worry all day and enjoyed the scenery and sunshine and did not begin to sense the menace until the sun went below the mountains on the left […] when the sun slipped below the ridge of the mountains it felt like a hammer blow” (227).
Any reprieves are short-lived, and soon Paulsen is battling the cruel, indifferent side of nature. Skunks spray him, a moose attacks him, a fall down Dalzell Gorge knocks him unconscious, and the team nearly falls through thin ice to their deaths in Norton Sound. Paulsen vividly captures the dark hand of nature in his description of the Yukon Valley’s stabbing cold: “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” (228).
Indeed, it’s not surprising that in his descriptions of the natural environment, Paulsen often combines positive and negative adverbs within the same sentence: “Alaska truly is wonderfully, viciously, terrifyingly, and joyously extreme” (132). He uses the same mix of positive and negative words to describe the race itself.
Humanizing the Animals
Besides his fondness for nature, Paulsen’s love for the dogs is a key motivating factor for his running the race. As he grows closer to the dogs, he also begins to see all animal life differently: He starts to see animals in human terms. In the first chapter, Paulsen explains how his changed perspective of animal life leads him to give up trapping and hunting. Throughout the book, Paulsen describes the dogs, and in some cases wild animals, as having human qualities.
For example, he repeatedly refers to the dogs’ human-like habits, such as their making beds for themselves: “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” (31). He mentions a dog named Fonzi “who would spend hours each night remaking his bed and he never got it quite right” (32). In addition, Cookie likes to stare at sunrises, and she smiles at him, according to Paulsen.
Paulsen even infers that some dogs may have a heroic streak and will come to the aid of a fellow canine in distress. He recounts an incident in which one of his dogs rescues another that has fallen to keep him from being run over by the sled: “[…] Murphy reached across the gangline, grabbed Devil’s harness by the X on his back, and snatched him to his feet; an instant reaction, one that almost certainly saved Devil’s life” (102).
When he witnesses another musher kick a dog to death, he does not describe the horrific incident as a case of animal cruelty; instead, he uses a term that is usually reserved for describing the taking of human life—murder. In Paulsen’s mind, there is no difference, and the man deserves severe punishment for killing “a friend” (216).
Paulsen also mentions the human-like qualities of some of the wild animals. For example, he describes how Marge, the coyote who befriends his dog team, climbs up on a dead poplar tree to get a better angle for hunting grouse: “She had used tools. Chimps use them, make and use crude tools to eat termites, and gorillas have done the same to make beds, but the incredible chauvinism of the human species has demanded that we make differences” (45).
Cross-Species Relationships: The Good and Bad
The story centers on cross-species relationships. In fact, the bulk of Winterdance focuses on Paulsen’s interactions with the dogs. After Paulsen arrives in Alaska and starts the race, his wife is out of the picture, and it’s just him and the dogs for miles and pages. Paulsen does not even name the minor human characters who come and go at the checkpoints and elsewhere. The reader becomes more familiar with the dogs—their names, personalities, needs, and physical abilities, which often exceed Paulsen’s. However, Paulsen makes it clear that these interspecies relationships can be either positive or negative, and it often depends on how humans approach them.
Paulsen uses family metaphors to describe his relationship with the dogs: “The bond that occurs between driver and dog is truly wonderful. It is more than love, becomes something close to what a mother must feel for her child with the added fact that the bond with sled dogs in particular is almost intensely symbiotic” (212). He goes on to explain that the driver is responsible for caring for the dogs’ basic needs and health, much like a parent, but that the dogs give back much more to the owner. For example, he points out that the decisions of a lead dog “can literally mean life or death for the team and driver, often when the driver can’t see what is happening” (212). He says that the relationship sometimes “becomes more, becomes spiritual, religious” (212).
However, not everyone who owns sled dogs views them as equal partners and friends as Paulsen does. Some just see them as tools to use to make money. Paulsen mentions the exploitation of dogs in the early Arctic and Antarctic expeditions: “Historically, the way of running those expeditions was to start with many dogs and kill them and eat them (and feed them to other dogs) as the expedition moved on” (213). Furthermore, Paulsen notes that during the Klondike gold rush, dogs were stolen from Seattle: “Any dog seen was stolen and taken up to Alaska to pull freight—either sleds or carts. They were worked to death and their bones still lie along the trails” (213). Paulsen recounts these historical stories of cruelty in the same chapter where a musher, whom he originally mistook for a nice guy, kills a dog in front of him. However, Paulsen says the dogs are rarely abused: “Mistreatment is almost unheard of in the race, so rare that when it does happen it stands out and jolts all the more for its infrequency” (218).
Paulsen notes that dogs “vary as much as people” (213), stating that people who cannot deal with the “individual personalities, small injuries, illness” should not have dogs (212). Paulsen not only humanizes the dogs; he dehumanizes himself, in a way, to understand the dogs better. He sleeps in the kennel with them. During the race, he even eats dog food and uses dog ointment: “It was the crumbling of the last barrier between me and the dogs” (172), he says. At one point, he tells Ruth, “I see things the way they see them” (54).
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