Gary Paulsen (1939–2021)

As well as being a stellar writer of children’s literature, Gary Paulsen was a seasoned dog musher, participating three times in the Alaskan Iditarod, the 1000 mile dog sled race. In this poetic picture book, beautifully illustrated in watercolours by his wife, Paulsen describes the sights and particularly the sounds of nighttime dog sledding. “Nothing in running dogs is quite so beautiful as a night run—,” he writes, “the cold is crisper, the dogs run for the pure joy of running, and the moon seems to dance on the snow.”

The picture book begins with his hitching up his seven trembling huskies, who sing “small songs of excitement when the harnesses are put on.” Once the run begins, there’s no sound but “the high-soft-shusshh-whine of the runners and the soft jingle of . . . [the dogs’] collars.” The team briefly encounters a pack of wolves, which run with them, and “pace our hearts and our lives.” In time, they find they’ve circled the cabin and have returned to where they began: “the dogs are coated with ice and the snaps on their collars and harness won’t open and their laughing-panting breath freezes on their cheeks and makes them all smiles, dogsmiles, doglaughs.”

As you can see from the above, Paulsen has fun with language here. There are times when I think he goes too far and risks losing the comprehension of his young audience. A couple of sentences are just a bit too abstract and mystical.

Overall, though, this is a lovely book. I’ve never been dog sledding but I certainly know those frigid winter nights when the full moon and the light’s reflection off the blue-white snow make the night so bright “you could read in the dark.”… (meer)

“The sun is on my back like a golden friend on this perfect day.”

As the title announces, this is a picture book about a brief period in time, not even a day, really. Beautifully illustrated by Paulsen’s artist wife in an array of greens and blues, it appears to be a personal account of the author’s observations of the creatures on the periphery of a Minnesota lake. As he paddles his canoe about, he not only observes animals on the shore line—red-winged blackbirds, monarch butterflies, herons, a doe and her fawn, a fox, raccoon, frogs, and a snake—but also creatures on the lake’s still surface (a mallard hen and her ducklings “spread out like a spotted fan around her”) and in its depths—sunfish and “the cold slash of a hunting northern pike” moving “like an arrow through the [lily] pads.”

Paulsen’s prose is beautiful and poetic. The water, he tells us is “so quiet it becomes part of the sky”. He is part of the unity of elements, gliding through the “airwater,” moving peacefully on the “skylake.”

Ruth Wright Paulsen’s paintings are all double spreads, creating a sense of openness, spaciousness, limitlessness.

The only thing that puzzles me is Paulsen’s conclusion, in which he reviews some of the wildlife he’s observed. He mentions a badger, but there’s no badger here that I could detect, and I wonder how an editor could have missed that the word should’ve been “raccoon”.

Other than this, Canoe Days, though not my preferred type of picture book—because it lacks a plot, is a lovely enough text for its kind.… (meer)

A fourteen-year-old boy has to take six thousand sheep up to the summer pasture and tend them all by himself, because his father’s hired man became seriously ill. The ranch is now shorthanded, so nobody even has time to stay with John and show him how to do things. It’s just him, four dogs, two horses and all those sheep. He’s already anxious and from the very first day things start to go wrong. Rattlesnakes, coyotes, thunderstorms, injuries, flash floods and a bear among them. Just one thing after another, in bewilderingly fast succession. The carnage from predators when they do come seems very high. The boy John admittedly thinks of giving up a few times, just leaving, but he sticks with the job and does his best. And grows through it.

At the end of a month, when his father comes up to the meadow with fresh supplies, he finds a connection to this stern parent he hadn’t felt before. His father shares some things about a legendary grandfather John had long admired. Sounds like he probably shouldn’t have, the relative was not at all a nice man. Legendary for his meanness, and did some pretty bad things that were kept hushed up by the family. John is shocked to find the truth is different from what he’d heard in the community, and glad to know he’s not like that man. But mostly this is about working the sheep, and handling all the problems and emergencies that arise, and the wonder of those smart border collies, who live for their job.

A really good book. I don’t love it like I did Hatchet, but it was much better than The River.… (meer)