Winterdance

Gary Paulsen starts the book broke, running a trapline out of a Minnesota cabin with a team of sled dogs, and tells his wife Ruth he doesn't want to come back in from the runs. She's the one who points out what that means — that he wants to run the Iditarod, a race he'd always considered proof some people are simply insane. He buys three green, half-wild Canadian dogs — Devil, Ortho and Murphy — two of whom chew out of their kennels and wreck the back of the truck on the drive home.

Training doesn't go the way it's supposed to: he crashes the sled repeatedly, gets lost on familiar trails, and the dogs keep finding their own way home without him. Neighbors fund the entry, and one drives him to Alaska. On the race, a wrong turn costs him a hundred and twenty extra miles, and farther down the trail he watches a moose attack another musher's team, killing that musher's lead dog while the man fires shot after shot at it. The race takes him seventeen and a half days, on almost no sleep, and by the end Paulsen is hallucinating on the trail. He finishes; heart disease would later force him off the runners for years, and he keeps only Cookie, his lead dog.

It's a memoir, not a training manual, and Paulsen isn't interested in making himself look competent — most of the book is him getting it wrong before the dogs teach him how to do it right. Readers coming from Hatchet expecting more of that book's kind of survival story should know this is a grown man's account of an adult obsession, with none of the young-adult scaffolding, and it takes its time getting to the race.