P.K. Butler's Reviews > Woodsong

Beautiful.

Paulsen has lived an extraordinary life, and he shares a portion of that life in these stories of his adventures with a team of sled dogs that teach him lessons about life. That dogs have much to teach us is his thesis, one explicitly expressed at the end of chapter three wherein he narrates of a terrible accident that sent him flying with his sled (though not the dog team) over a 20 foot frozen waterfall. Badly injured and alone in the wilderness, he would surely die, but his team came back to retrieve him. Once home again (thanks entirely to the dogs) and recuperating, he tell us . . .

" . . . 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."

If you've never ready Gary Paulsen, your life is missing something meaningful. I only just discovered him, and quickly ordered a half dozen more books. Since Paulsen has written about a hundred books, I have much to look forward to.