From Dogsong by Gary Paulsen
‘The Trance’




...The wind cut at his cheeks and he turned his hood away from the force, took the cold.

“You will have to know me,” he said quietly to the dogs after a time. “Just as I will have to know you.”

Two of them looked back at him. It was perhaps not an invitation. It was perhaps not a look that meant anything at all except that they looked back and their eyes caught his eyes and he knew they would run. He knew they would run. He knew when he put his feet to the sled and took the handlebar in his hands that they would run and he did not know how he knew this but only that it was so.

When he was on the runners he reached down and disengaged the snowhook and used the small lip-squeak sound that Oogruk had told him to use to get the dogs running.

They were off so fast he was almost jerked backward off the sled. It wasn’t a gaggle now, but a pulling force with all the dogs coordinating to line the sled out across the ice, a silent curve of power out ahead of him.

The feeling, he thought, the feeling is that the sled is alive; that I am alive and the sled is alive and the snow is alive and the ice is alive and we are all part of the same life...