Dogsong
Authors: Gary Paulsen
Dogsong
Also by Gary Paulsen
Dancing Carl
Hatchet
Sentries
Tracker
Woodsong
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1985 by Gary Paulsen
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Also available in a Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition
First Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers ebook edition May 2012
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Paulsen, Gary. Dogsong.
Summary: A fourteen-year-old Eskimo boy who feels assailed by the modernity of his life takes a 1400-mile journey by dog sled across ice, tundra, and mountains seeking his own “song” of himself.
1. EskimosâJuvenile fiction. 2. Children's stories, American.
[1. EskimosâFiction]
I. Title.
PZ7.P2843Do     1985       [Fic]  84-20443
ISBN 0-02-770180-8 (hc.)
ISBN 0-689-82700-8 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-4391-1523-7 (eBook)
This book is dedicated to
KAY-GWA-DAUSH
to honor her song
PART ONE
The
Trance
1
I came wet into the world.
On both sides there were cliffs
,
white cliffs that were my mother's thighs.
And I didn't cry though it was cold
by the white cliffs and I was afraid.
I came wet into the world.
Â
âan old Eskimo man relating the memory of his birth in a snowhouse on the sea ice.
R
ussel Susskit rolled out of the bunk and put his feet on the floor and listened in the darkness to the sounds of morning.
They were the same sounds he had always heard, sounds he used to listen for. Now in the small government houseâsixteen by twentyâthey grated like the ends of a broken bone.
He heard his father get up and hack and cough and spit into the stove. His father smoked cigarettes all day, rolled them with Prince Albert tobacco, and had one hanging on his lip late into the night. In the mornings he had to cough the cigarettes up. The sound tore at Russel more than at his father.
It meant something that did not belong on the coast of the sea in a small Eskimo village. The coughing came from Outside, came from the tobacco which came from Outside and Russel hated it.
After the coughing and spitting there was the sound of the fire being lit, a sound he used to look forward to as he woke. The rustle of paper and kindling and diesel fuel, which was used to start the wood, the scratch of a match, the flame taking and the stink of the diesel oil filling the one room. Russel did not like the smell of the diesel oil but he did not hate it the way he hated his father's coughing in the morning.
Russel heard the wind outside and that was good except that it carried the sounds of the village waking, which meant the sound of snowmachine engines starting up.
The snowmachines were loud and scared the seals. To fourteen-year-old Russel the whine of them above the wind hurt as much as the sound of coughing. He was coming to hate them, too.
It was still dark in the house because the village generator hadn't been turned on for the day. The darkness was cut by the light of the oil lamp on the table as his father touched a match to the wick.
Flat light filled the room and Russel looked around as he always did. It was a standard government houseâa winter
house. They would move to summer fish-camps later. But in the winter they came into the village and stayed in the government houses. Boxes is what they are, really, he thought: boxes to put people in.
In one corner there was a small table with an oilcloth table cover. The cloth was patterned with roses and Russel did not know why his father had ordered it. There were no women there. Russel's mother had been gone for years, gone with a white trapper. But his father had liked the roses on the tablecloth and had sent for it. Russel had never seen a rose except on the tablecloth and on television over at the central meeting house where there was a set for watching. He did not think roses were as pretty as the small flowers that came in the tundra in the summer while they were taking salmon from the rivers. But his father liked the roses and Russel liked his father so he tried liking the roses.
All around the walls were pictures of Jesus.
His father loved Jesus more than he loved the roses. When he was young his father had told him about Jesus and Russel had listened but he didn't understand. He supposed the idea was something that came when you got old, the understanding of Jesus, and in the meantime he looked at all the pictures and wondered what they meant.
There was one in which Jesus had thorns
on his head and they were cutting into him and making him bleed. Russel asked his father why Jesus would want to do such a thing.
“Because he is the Son of God and is meant to suffer for your sins,” his father said, which made no sense at all to Russel: the story of Jesus happened so long ago, back in the Before Time, and Russel couldn't remember doing anything wrong enough to make a man shove thorns in his head. But he said nothing against it. Jesus kept his father from drinking, in some way which he also did not understand, and that was good. When his father used to drink, things were all bad and if Jesus kept that out of his life, even if He did it mysteriously, that was all right.
But he got bored with the pictures around the walls showing Jesus with light in back of him and bleeding and carrying a cross. Even in the tiny bathroom where there was the bucket there was also a picture of Jesus, and another hung over the stove. All the pictures were cut out of religious magazines which people Outside had sent his father.
Two snowmachines went by the house. They were moving fast, too fast to stop in the dark if something jumped out in front of them. Russel winced at the noise.
Russel owned a snowmachine. Owned a motor sled. And he used it. But he didn't like
snowmachines and used one only because he needed a means to get around and he didn't have any dogs. There were almost no dogs in the village. Just one team, owned by old Oogruk. And Oogruk didn't use them but simply kept them for memories.
Russel pulled on his felt-duffel slippers and slipped them inside the rubber shoepacs that made up the outer boot. He had slept in his pants and it took only a moment to pull the undershirt on and a sweater.
He stepped out to the food cache in the dark. It was an elevated wooden hut filled with caribou and seal and fish meat. Earlier in the winter the men and boys of the village had gone back into the hills on snowmachines and found a herd of caribou and they had worked around them with rifles, killing into the center. Russel and his father had taken twelve of them, some others had killed twenty or more, and they brought the meat back on sledges pulled by the snowmachines.
Russel used a hatchet to chop off some slivers of caribou and a tiny bit of seal meat. He took them back in the house.
On the wood stove was a pan and he pulled it over onto the heat and threw in the seal and caribou meat. The frozen seal meat started to melt and give off oil and soon the smell of the meat filled the room and he liked that.
He stood looking down at the pan and when the meat was warmâstill nearly rawâhe took out a piece of caribou and put it in his mouth and used an
ulu
âa short curved knifeâto cut the meat just on the edge of his lips.
He chewed and swallowed, then took another bite. Cutting it cleanly, chewing, staring at the stove, the pan, at nothing.
“You should cook the meat longer,” his father said, coming from the bathroom. “We do not eat it raw anymore.”
Russel said nothing, nodded, but took more meat.
“There are small things in the meat to make you sick. Small worms and bugs. When you cook the meat more it kills them.”
“I was hungry.”
“Well. Next time, eh?”
Russel nodded. “Next time.”
His father watched the meat cook. “We used to eat everything raw but now we have learned to cook it. That's one of the good things we learned.”
Russel smiled. “Raw meat tastes better. You get the blood then.”
“That's true. But you also get the small things to make you sick. It's better to cook it.”
“Yes, Father.” He wanted to go on and say,
Father, I am not happy with myself
, but he did not. It was not the sort of thing you talked about, this feeling he had, unless you
could find out what was causing it. He did not know enough of the feeling to talk.
“There were some of the old things that were not bad,” his father said. “I am too young to remember many of them, but I was told a lot of them by my father. You did not meet him because before you were born he died in a bad storm on the sea. His
umiak
was torn by ice when they were walrus hunting and all the men in the boat died but one who rode to the ice on a sealskin float. It was an awful thing, an awful thing. The women cut themselves deep and bled in grief when they learned. I was just a small boy, but I remember the grief.”
His father scratched himself and took some meat, still nearly raw. “I like the blood taste, too.” He bit, cut and chewed and put the
ulu
back on the stove top.
“Father, something is bothering me.”
He replied around the meat. “I know. I have seen it.”