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    This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs
    This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs
    This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs

    By Gary Paulsen and Tim Jessell

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In the National Book Award longlist book This Side of Wild, Newbery Honor–winning author Gary Paulsen shares surprising true stories about his relationship with animals, highlighting their compassion, intellect, intuition, and sense of adventure.

    Gary Paulsen is an adventurer who competed in two Iditarods, survived the Minnesota wilderness, and climbed the Bighorns. None of this would have been possible without his truest companions: his animals. Sled dogs rescued him in Alaska, a sickened poodle guarded his well-being, and a horse led him across a desert. Through his interactions with dogs, horses, birds, and more, Gary has been struck with the belief that animals know more than we may fathom.

    His understanding and admiration of animals is well known, and in This Side of Wild, which has taken a lifetime to write, he proves the ways in which they have taught him to be a better person.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
    Release dateSep 29, 2015
    ISBN9781481451529
    Author

    Gary Paulsen

    Gary Paulsen (1931–2021) was one of the most honored writers of contemporary literature for young readers, author of three Newbery Honor titles, Dogsong, Hatchet, and The Winter Room. He wrote over 100 books for adults and young readers. 

    Read more from Gary Paulsen

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    Reviews for This Side of Wild

    3.5/5

    17 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is a collection of memorable stories in Gary Paulsen's life bringing him to the conclusion, "Animals know more than we fathom." An excellent choice for book discussion that will interest adults as well as teens, appropriate for ages 10 & up.
    • 2/5
      middlegrade nonfiction. Gary Paulsen true adventure stories with more animals? I thought he couldn't miss with that one, but I found the entries inside a bit fragmented, like partial journal entries from a mind that wanders a lot. Which still might be really good, but I was hoping for something that younger kids might pick up and get into right away, and after 18 pages I hadn't found that.
    • 3/5
      Gary Paulsen tells a few stories from his own life that deal with his encounters with the wild. For fans of Gary Paulsen, this will be a happy read. If you are not a fan, you might become one.
    • 3/5
      This is a look back by Mr. Paulsen as he looks at some of the animals he found interesting in his life.Mr. Paulsen talks about several animals in his look back as an animal-lover. One dog, Gretchen, actually had conversations with him. He witnesses intelligent and loving behavior from many different kinds of animals.If you like stories of animals, you may like this book. It’s certainly not a bad book, but it merely skips about Mr. Paulsen’s life and randomly talks about animals and ends abruptly.

    Book preview

    This Side of Wild - Gary Paulsen

    INTRODUCTION: ALONE

    I crossed the Pacific Ocean the first time when I was seven years old, in 1946. We, my mother and I, were headed to meet my father in the Philippine Islands, where we would live for three years. Because flying was still very risky and extremely expensive, we took a troop ship filled with soldiers and sailors, which fairly crawled across the water.

    The Pacific was—and is, of course—huge; it’s the largest single entity on the planet. All the land masses of all the other parts of the earth would easily fit in it with water left over. The ship, as the cliché says, was very small, and on the ship, I was correspondingly even more tiny, so that one would think I would feel dwarfed, alienated in some way.

    In fact, just the opposite happened: I loved it. The incredible blue that stretched up and away to the horizon drew me in, embraced me, made me feel that I was a part of it, and I remember sitting day after day (my mother was almost clinically seasick) in the bow of the rusted old Victory ship (it had just gone through the entire Second World War and had survived—barely), marveling that such a thing would be, could be. In the distance now and then I would see dolphins; closer in, flying fish; and still closer, at the stern, sharks waiting for the daily garbage from the galley. But they did not seem to be part of my relationship with the ocean; they seemed separate in some way.

    The ocean was what drew me then, and I knew it would pull me in all my life. Later, when I discovered sailing, it was completely natural that I would sail on the Pacific by myself. It was like coming home.

    And it was here, three hundred miles off the coast of California in a twenty-two-foot Schock-designed sloop, sailing single-handed, that I would come to know—to know—how small a part of everything I really happened to be.

    It was night, cloudless but with a marine layer of haze that dampened even any light from the stars. Pitch-dark, inside-of-a-dead-cow black-night dark, and as it so often seemed to happen, the wind completely stopped. Not only was the wind dead around me but dead for hundreds of miles to the north as well, for there were no swells, no motion whatsoever in the water coming down from the north. The boat drifted in aimless, small circles, as still as if we were on a tiny pond in somebody’s yard. I had never seen it so still and quiet, and I poured a cup of hot tea from my thermos and sat sipping it, thinking in all the world—in all the planets in all the worlds—I was alone, completely and vastly and wonderfully alone.

    Alone.

    And precisely at that moment a young gray whale, completely unsuspected, unheard, came up alongside and lay his or her head across the stern of the boat, virtually in my lap, pushing the boat down so hard it seemed about to roll over. Then, blowing a huge spout of snotty air, it slid backward off the boat and back under the water and was gone.

    I remember precisely what happened next.

    I stopped breathing.

    And I spilled my tea.

    And I realized we are never quite alone.

    PREFACE: THE LEARNING PROCESS

    Finally, after many attempts and filled-out forms for the military bureaucracy, I had been given permission to ride on a horse and explore that portion of the great southern desert known as Mcregor Missile and Bombing Range, which is located north and slightly east of El Paso, Texas. It has been in use almost constantly since the Second World War, or nearly, and is pocketed with craters from explosions and spotted here and there with blue painted target bombs that were not meant to explode but simply made a puff when they landed.

    More important for my uses, the area had once, in prehistory, been along a water course that flowed past a series of tall buttes, fed in an unmeasured ancient prehistory by mountain streams and snowmelt that has long since dried up. In that long-ago time, the people who lived along this course worked at making pottery, and there was wonderful beauty in it. The people, however, had not learned to make pottery-curing ovens to bake it. Instead they would pile the freshly formed and painted pots interlaced with sun-dried mesquite and make a bonfire of the whole pile.

    Some of the pots would make it and would be fired and ring true to a testing finger snap and be useful for gathering food and carrying water. Others, perhaps most of the clay pots, from the way it appeared, cracked and broke into shards in the crude heat and were left in clumps in the desert. The ash blew and washed away, leaving the shards to cure in the heat and sun for the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years down to the present.

    Many of the shards were of significant size—two, three inches across—large enough so that the patterns and beauty of the design could still be easily seen and appreciated. Always in brown or black or gray earth pigments, the patterns themselves would be lightning bolts, or snake lines, or rippling water signs, or dancing clouds, or line drawings of deer or small animals or lizards. . . .

    They were . . . all . . . incredibly beautiful. The law forbade taking any of the shards, which seemed particularly absurd, considering they were smack in the middle of a bomb and missile range, bound to be hit and destroyed eventually. But that, the likelihood of their temporary nature, perhaps made them even more powerful in their beauty.

    I sketched and memorized some of them and rode endless miles over many days from shard pile to shard pile and came to realize that there were many similarities among them, as if people in one area were trying to mimic or communicate with people from another—should they see one another’s pots. And farther north, sixty or seventy miles, there was a place called Three Rivers, where there were thousands of petroglyphs on a shallow ridge, and many of those drawings seemed very like the drawings on the shards.

    Maps, I thought, to water or good soil or good hunting? Messages of joy or happiness or love? Or portraits of lives?

    At first I became enthralled and then, finally, obsessed. I found pile after pile of shards, worked intently from one to the next, and was so caught up in it that soon the mare I was riding caught it from me, started looking for signs of the little piles of clay shards as day after day we made search patterns back and forth across the desert. I slept in the horse trailer with her alongside in a wire corral at night, fed her hay from the back of my old truck and water from plastic jerricans, and each day we set off in a new direction: out five to seven miles, over half a mile, then back, pile to pile, trying to learn more about these ancient people, what the art said, meant. . . .

    Until.

    I carried ration water for traveling in a plastic tube in back of my saddle cantle and watered her in my hat. It was a hot, muggy day, and I realized suddenly that the mare had been sweating excessively and needed water. At the same moment, she and I spotted a new pile of shards along a small gully some ten feet ahead, and I felt her interest quicken as I pulled her over and swung off to the ground, thinking to water her first before looking at the pottery, my eyes on the shards that lay in a generally larger pile than some of the others.

    I undid the water tube, took one, two steps toward her front end, and felt the click/slam/push of a rattlesnake hitting my ankle. It hit me in silence, then rattled. . . .

    And changed my whole life.

    I do not have an inordinate fear of snakes, not even rattlers. In fact, I kind of like them. They have their own living to make—and it is a hard one, living two inches off the ground, no legs, every animal an

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