This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs by Gary Paulsen

Author:Gary Paulsen [Paulsen, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horses, Boys & Men, Juvenile Nonfiction, Animals, Dogs
ISBN: 9781481451505
Google: UuMergEACAAJ
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2015-09-29T20:48:35+00:00

We were not to play. We were working, studying, thinking.

Learning.

And so that day passed. Not with me testing her but the opposite. She was finding out what I knew, what I thought, and somewhere in that day, I realized with a kind of shock, or stunned belief, that we were actually “talking.”

I had, as a small child, been raised by my grandmother—a wonderful, all-knowing woman brought up on farms in Norway and later in northern Minnesota. She believed in the old Norse tales of gods and goddesses and spirits of another world, another spirit world that could and often did talk through animals, telling tales of love and hate and joy and music. Sometimes when birds were singing, she would put her hand on my arm and say, “Songs, for you and me, from them; the birds sing for them, for us. . . .”

I did not disbelieve it, actually, but simply thought it was something perhaps only old people could know, a code I did not understand yet. Like when it was going to rain or snow or when somebody would be close to death or birth. I was not skeptical so much as blank, unable to understand.

But now it was true for me, and open, and clear. Gretchen was, in her way, a very real way, bringing me into a conversation; she knew many things I liked, and now she was showing me some of the things she liked and disliked. We were very definitely “talking,” and as the afternoon drew on, my level of astonishment grew lower and I accepted it and began to understand what I was really doing:

Having a conversation with a friend.

We had—or rather Gretchen had—found a way to break down the communication barrier and interlock with another species. It was simple, clean, and very elegant—we looked at things, said what we thought of them, and with more depth than I thought possible, we understood each other completely.

It was, in many ways, for me a lifesaving understanding. I had come to the army as an escape from my life—as many men did, I suppose—and though I’d had a complex and rougher childhood than most, I was still virtually unsophisticated. I had seen many ugly things as a child in the Philippines, when the war with Japan was still not quite finished, and through the hazy viewfinder of alcoholic parents, but as the real world hit me, I was simply not able to handle it.

Because I had a semi-technical background in high school, the army started putting me through various electronic-weapons schools: missiles, both antiaircraft and surface-to-surface tactical weapons, which included the care, maintenance, and firing of nuclear weapons, and so to nuclear-warhead schools.

At that time—and in many ways it is still true—the public was given at best a very limited and horribly skewed idea of what nuclear war would be like. True, we had dropped two nuclear weapons (designated then as atomic bombs) on Japan—one on a city called Hiroshima and another on a city named Nagasaki.

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