Dogsong Read online

  Dogsong

  Also by Gary Paulsen

  Dancing Carl

  Hatchet

  Sentries

  Tracker

  Woodsong

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  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

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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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. Eskimos—Juvenile fiction. 2. Children’s stories, American.

  [1. Eskimos—Fiction]

  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

  CONTENTS

  THE TRANCE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  THE DREAMRUN

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  DOGSONG

  Hatchet excerpt

  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.

  —an old Eskimo man relating the memory of his birth in a snowhouse on the sea ice.

  Russel 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 house—sixteen by twenty—they 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 house—a 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 a
nd 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 warm—still nearly raw—he took out a piece of caribou and put it in his mouth and used an ulu—a short curved knife—to 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.”

  “But I don’t know what it is.”

  “I know that, too. It is part that you are fourteen and have thirteen winters and there are things that happen then which are hard to understand. But the other part that is bothering you I cannot say because I lack knowledge. You must get help from some other place.”

  Russel nodded, then thought. “But where?”

  His father looked at the ceiling, back down, thinking. “When I have trouble that I do not understand I sometimes get help from Jesus Christ.”

  Russel hesitated. He did not want to sound discourteous but he was sure Jesus wouldn’t help.

  “But you do not have Jesus so that may not work for you. If you do not have Jesus I think you should go and talk to Oogruk. He is old and sometimes wise and he also tells good stories.”

  “Oogruk? For help?”

  His father laughed. “I know. You think he is old and just babbles. But there are two things there, there are Oogruk’s words and there is Oogruk’s song. Songs and words are not always the same. They do not always say the same thing. Sometimes words lie—but the song is always true. If you listen to Oogruk’s words, sometimes they don’t make sense. But if you listen to his song, there is much to learn from Oogruk.”

  “All right. I will go. But will Oogruk give a song to me?”

  Russel had heard about the songs his father spoke of. They were private and belonged only to the person who owned them. Now almost no one had a song.

  “That is for him to know. Now go and get more meat. You did not bring in enough.” His father thought a moment. “And bring in two of the heads so they will begin to thaw.”

  “You want the heads?”

  “Not for me. For Oogruk. Take the heads when you go, as a gift. He loves the eyes.”

  Russel nodded and went out into the dark again.

  2

  There was a time when I was young. It was a bad time when there was not meat anywhere you looked and we had eaten of all the dogs.

  We asked our old mother if we could kill her and eat of her until the deer came back and we would have done that thing. We would have done that thing. But that morning a deer came and my uncle took it with an arrow in the right manner and we did not have to do that thing. More deer came and we did not have to eat our old mother.

  —an old Eskimo telling of his youth.

  Russel had been in Oogruk’s house many times but he always stopped before he went in. The dogs always drew him, drew his eyes over and he stopped. They were tied near the elevated food cache—a rough log hut up on stilts—and they watched him with interested eyes, slanted, deep eyes, watched him as he threw the caribou heads on the ledge surrounding the food cache.

  The dogs.

  There were five of them. Great red beasts with blue eyes, a cross between wolf and Mackenzie River huskies with some Coppermine River village blood mixed in. They were shy, aloof dogs who did not want people to touch them except to harness them or feed them. Russel knew little of dogs, but a man who knew dogs said they were good.

  They were the only team in the village and never worked, so they were fat. But the fat hid muscle that could go forever.

  Russel turned away from them and went to the door of Oogruk’s house. Again he stopped, hesitating. It wasn’t that he was afraid to go in. Everybody was welcome at Oogruk’s. The old man loved company. It was more that Oogruk lived differently and inside the house—which outside looked like any government box—you had to change. The mind had to change, and the nose—Russel thought, grimacing—because Oogruk lived the old way. He would not allow electricity, used a seal-oil lamp and had skins on the floor. Some of the skins, all from caribou, were green tanned and they smelled when they grew warm. It was not a bad smell but it was strong and took some getting used to.

  As did Oogruk. The way of Oogruk, the way he looked and was; it took a different thinking.

  Russel opened the door without knocking, as was the custom, and went in and closed the door. Outside there had been bright-light and sea-wind off the frozen sea ice, salt-wind. Inside it was almost pitch-dark. The windows were covered with smoke grime, and the room was full of smoke from the lamp on a box in the corner, a seal-oil lamp with a moss wick that threw a tiny yellow glow around the room.

  Leaning against the wall were harpoons and lances, hanging on nails were arrow-bags and bows and small ivory carvings. On other nails were skin clothes, squirrel-skin undergarments and caribou-skin parkas, some old and some not so old, all hanging loosely and thick with the smoke.

  Against the far wall sat Oogruk. At first it was hard to know where the smoke ended and Oogruk began. Except for a small breechclout he was nude, and his skin was the same color as the smoke, a tan-brown, rich and oily. His hair had gone white, or would have been white, but it had taken the smoke, too, seemed to have flown into the smoke and become part of the smoke from the lamp.

  “Hello. Hello. You sit down and we’ll talk for a while.” The voice was strong—it always amazed Russel to hear Oogruk’s voice. He was so old
but the voice moved like strong music. “I will talk for you.”

  Russel nodded and sat near the right wall, glad that nobody else was there. Often children would come in to listen—with respect, but out of curiosity more than anything—and Russel was glad that they were not there now. “I brought some deer heads for you,” he said when he’d settled on the hides. “With the eyes. They are out on the platform.”

  Oogruk swiveled his head to face Russel. The eyes were opaque, a milk blindness over them, but Russel never thought of him as blind.

  “I eat of the eyes when I can but people don’t save them anymore,” Oogruk said.

  “Should I bring them in?”

  “Later. Later. Did you see my dogs when you came in?”

  Russel nodded, then remembered the blindness and said aloud, “Yes. They are well. They are fat.”

  “Good. I don’t drive them anymore but they are good dogs and I worry that they don’t get fed enough.”

  “They are being taken care of by every-body—they are all right.”

  Oogruk said nothing for a time. The eyes moved back to the flame from the lamp so the thick-white caught the yellow of the light and glowed for a second.

  “Dogs are like white people,” Oogruk said, looking at the flame. “They do not know how to get a settled mind. They are always turning, looking for a better way to lie down. And if things go wrong they have anger and frustration. They are not like us. It is said that dogs and white people come from the same place.” He snorted—a nasal sound, a kind of chaa sound through his nose that could have meant anything from scorn to anger to humor. “I do not know how true that is because white people are clearly not dogs. But they have many of the same ways and so one wonders.”

  Russel nodded but said nothing. One time he had seen a bushpilot who had crashed his plane near the village. The plane was broken in the middle and the pilot had stood screaming at it and kicking it for failing him and falling from the sky. He treated the plane like a living animal until he got tired, then he walked away as a dog would walk away from a stick he’d been tearing at.