9/12/22, 12:41 PM StudySync - Read - First Read: Woodsong

First Read: Woodsong

Note

Before, during, and after reading, remember to annotate by asking questions to deepen understanding,
tracking the relationship between individuals, ideas, and events, and responding with connections and
inferences.

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From Chapter One

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 wasn’t 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:

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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 rose—almost like a
rock skipping on the trail—and 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 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 doe’s 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.

The smell excited the dogs and they began to run faster, although continuing down the trail; I turned to
look back from the sled and saw why the doe was frightened.

Wolves.

They bounded over the trail after the doe even as I watched. These were not the large timber wolves but
the smaller northern brush wolves, perhaps weighing forty or fifty pounds each, about as large as most of
my team. I think they are called northern coyotes.

Except that they act as wolves. They pack and have pack social structures like timber wolves, and hunt in
packs like timber wolves.

And they were hunting the doe.

There were seven of them and not one looked down the trail to see me as they jumped across the sled
tracks after the deer. They were so intent on her, and the smell of her, that I might as well not have existed.

And they were gaining on her.

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9/12/22, 12:41 PM StudySync - Read - First Read: Woodsong

I stood on the brakes to stop the sled and set the snow-hook to hold the dogs and turned. The dogs
immediately swung down off the trail toward the lake, trying to get at the wolves and deer. The snowhook
came loose and we began to slide down the lake bank. I jerked the hook from the snow and hooked it on
a small poplar that held us.

The doe, in horror now, and knowing what was coming, left the bank of the lake and bounded out onto the
bad ice. Her tail was fully erect, a white flash as she tried to reach out and get speed, but the ice was too
thin.

Too thin for all the weight of her on the small, pointed hooves and she went through and down in a huge
spray of shattered ice and water.

She was up instantly, clambering and working to get back up on top of the ice next to the hole. Through
sheer effort in her panic she made it.

But it slowed her too much.

In those few moments of going through the ice and getting out she lost her lead on the wolves and they
were on her.

On her.

In all my time in the woods, in the wondrous dance of it, I have many times seen predators fail. As a matter
of fact, they usually fail. I once saw a beaver come out of a hole on the ice near his lodge in the middle of
winter and stand off four wolves. He sustained one small bite on his tail and inflicted terrible damage with
his teeth on the wolves, killing one and wounding the other three. I have seen rabbits outwit foxes and
watched red squirrels tease martens and get away with it, but this time it was not to be.

Excerpted from Woodsong by Gary Paulsen, published by Simon & Schuster.

Annotations

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