Dogsong

The Arctic elements of ice, wind, snow, wind, and cold are often portrayed by Paulsen as parental figures; metaphors such as “the mother of wind and the father of blue ice” (80), and “the wind would die and go back to its mother and the cold would come down from the father of ice and the Northern Lights would come to dance” (80), are scattered throughout the book. The Inuit perception of the environment as a parental figure makes sense. As parental figures provide sustenance and teach self-reliance, “Cold brought the first ice to the sea, the first strong ice so they could get out and hunt seals. Cold brought the fattening up of games so it was good to eat. It brought snow and made everything clean, it made storing meat and fish easy” (48). Even though the cold nearly kills Russel and Nancy at several points, he doesn’t resent it: “Cold could kill as well. But if treated fairly, if treated as a friend and if caution was taken, cold was good” (48). When Nancy says that it is cold, Russel tells her, “Cold is our friend” (150).

Descriptions of the cold, ice, and wind are plentiful and transport the reader into the tundra with Russel: “It was cold, standing cold. So cold you could spit and it would bounce” (34). On his journey, both in reality and in his prophetic dreams, Russel becomes one with the ice he is running his team on, and one with the wind and the fog, so the reader is in no doubt about the depth of respect Russel has for the Arctic environment. The same respect and honor are shown to the wildlife that Oogruk and Russel hunt. Oogruk teaches Russel the tradition of thanking every kill and putting food in its mouth as a sign of gratitude and respect. Russel feels self-conscious the first time he does this: “A part of him felt silly for that. He was far enough away from the old ways still to almost not believe in it. Yet another part of him felt right, more right than he’d been in a long time”. (44). This self-consciousness vanishes once Russel fully embraces the Inuit ways. Russel gains a full appreciation of humans’ precarious position in nature, the successful balance of which depends on deep understanding and respect, not on control.

With this understanding Russel not only hunts more successfully, but also starts to find his song. The interactions Russel has with his dogs and other animals are equally deep. After opening his mind and allowing Oogruk’s ancient teachings to sink in, Russel feels connected to his dogs, the mammoth, and the polar bear on a mystical level. He feels what they feel. In his dream Russel becomes the mammoth, a melding that mirrors his connection to the polar bear, and on the endless runs he melds with his dog team so they can read each other’s minds and he trusts them implicitly to guide him.

This connection is in stark contrast to how Russel perceives life in the village, where people have abandoned the use of dog teams for noisy and polluting snowmachines and are more interested in watching shows beamed in on the communal television than connecting with nature. Oogruk and Russel shun the white missionaries’ ways of trying to control nature, for example by cooking meat before eating it. When Russel finds Nancy’s snowmachine, abandoned because it has run out of fuel, he smiles and says to his dogs, “They need fuel that is not part of the land. They cannot run on fat and meat” (130). Russel understands that the only way to truly survive in the Arctic is to only live with what the Arctic can provide.