57 pages • 1 hour read
Gary PaulsenWinterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod
Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Eagle River”
The race is about to get underway on Fourth Street in downtown Anchorage when Paulsen makes a rookie mistake. He becomes concerned that Cookie, the long-time leader of the team and his favorite dog, has never run a race. Therefore, he replaces her in the lead position with a newly acquired dog named Nelson, who had race experience, albeit very limited. The move turns out to be a disaster. Nelson leads the team off the trail and on a hell ride through an Anchorage residential neighborhood: “We went through people’s yards, ripped down fences, knocked over garbage cans” (145).
He finally manages to stop the team by hooking a stop sign. He puts Cookie back in the lead, and she saves the day, guiding the team back on the trail. They arrive at Eagle River, the first checkpoint in suburban Anchorage, four and a half hours after starting the race.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Skwentna”
A trapper’s snowmachine track confuses Cookie, and she leads the team off the trail and into a mountain range. Twenty-seven other dog teams follow Cookie’s scent and also go astray. As the teams run into each other, dog fights ensue, and a moose attacks Paulsen. Another musher shoots the moose dead, but not before it kills the man’s lead dog.
Seeing the man crying over the death of his favorite dog, Paulsen decides to help him get back on the trail by having his sled pull a piece of meat on a rope to lead the man’s team back onto the main trail. The man then hooks up another dog to lead his team.
Suffering from lack of sleep, Paulsen almost misses the next checkpoint at Skwentna, but Cookie bails him out again, turning on a side trail that leads directly to the checkpoint and “a pile of food bags” (162).
Chapter 10 Summary: “Finger Lake”
Cookie leads the team into the Finger Lake checkpoint, and they stop without any prompting from Paulsen. Paulsen spends most of his time at the checkpoint checking the dogs’ toes.
Paulsen takes a final step toward becoming a dog himself, or at least connecting totally with their world: Hunger closes in on him, and he decides to eat dog food. He says, “it was the crumbling of the last barrier between me and the dogs. I had actually started to ‘think dog’” (173).
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
The main lesson Paulsen learns in these chapters is how dependent he is on the dogs and their instincts. After putting an untested dog in the lead and getting off to a bad start, he puts Cookie, the dog he developed a special relationship with before the race, back in the lead, and it pays off. Cookie proves herself to be a true leader in these chapters despite her mistake caused by the snowmachine. She sniffs out the trail and guides the team back on track after they get lost in Anchorage. She further proves her value as a four-legged compass when she guides the team into the checkpoint at Skwentna without any prompting from an exhausted Paulsen. In fact, at the end of Chapter 9, Paulsen articulates his heightened sense of respect for the dogs, seeing them as his lifeline in the race: “My basic understanding of values had changed […] I had seen god and he was a dog-man” (163).
Paulsen also puts his pre-race lessons into practice by focusing more on the dogs’ health needs. For example, he spends most of his time at the Finger Lake checkpoint examining his dogs’ toes, looking for tiny cuts caused by “razor snow” (170). In the early days of the race, Paulsen quickly experiences some of the deadly dangers and chaos that the trail’s unpredictability, coupled with his own lack of experience, produces.
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