Arctic Snowmobilities: Encounters with Sled Dogs in Gary Paulsen’s Winterdance

Abstract

This chapter explores human-dog encounters in the Alaskan Arctic with particular reference to the US writer Gary Paulsen’s memoir Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Alaskan Dog-Racing (1995), a text telling of his experience of the famous sled dog race Iditarod through wintry wilderness from Anchorage to Nome. In this text, nonhuman animals play a significant role and are part of the reconstruction of the narrator’s identity, as they locate him relationally and place him in the environment. The chapter pays particular attention to the representation of human-dog interaction as an affective and transcorporeal encounter. Examining Paulsen’s narrative mapping of the northern wilderness as a mode of joint human-nonhuman mobility, I aim to bring animal studies and especially materialist animal theory into dialogue with mobility studies in a way that takes into account the role of the nonhuman in the contexts of movement and spatiality, snowmobility. The chapter concludes that the shared activity of dog sledding leads to a transformation of identity and is thus an example of Haraway’s “becoming with” and Vermeulen’s view suggesting that such entanglements of the human and nonhuman are characteristic of the way in which life is imagined in Anthropocene fiction.