This Side of Wild Quotes

“While now and then you hear somebody talking about how “. . . beautiful and elegant the predator-prey relationship is, how natural and proper the death of the prey is,” it is usually so much misunderstood balderdash by people who have not witnessed it very many times, or worse, by people who have witnessed only highly edited versions on film.”
― Gary Paulsen, This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs

“It’s just that those things don’t seem to have the weight, the measureless beauty of countless sunsets and dawns, the simple grace and clear glory of nature.”
― Gary Paulsen, This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs

“Had it been just the two of us with the flock, I am sure it would have been a complete disaster. But Louie came with a helper, partner, friend, second brain: a border collie named (he must have wanted the similarities in names) Louise, and she quickly—after watching me for a moment and seeing how useless I was—took over completely.”
― Gary Paulsen, This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs

“He reached now and ran one of Gretchen’s soft ears through his gnarled, bent fingers, like silk through barbwire. “And I never saw it until I started with Gretchen. Got her to sit one day. The same day, she looked a long time at me and at a piece of cookie”—and here she perked up, ears more alert with the word “cookie”—“in my hand, and she saw the cookie and my eyes and then she sat. Clean and down. As much as if she’d said, ‘I’ll sit and then you give me that piece of cookie,’ and she did and I did and it was the first time I knew I had been wrong all along. I never trained one animal. Not once . . .” “They trained you.”
― Gary Paulsen, This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs

“Age didn’t seem to matter; nor did physical condition, though everything crazy you do when you’re young, every bar fight, every rough horse ridden and thrown from, every torturous twist the military does to your body comes back with a kind of staggering vengeance when you get old. Creaking bones, small and large traveling pains, bad vision . . . And none of it seemed to matter even remotely; the pain became a kind of wonderful recognition that I was still alive, another obstacle to beat or, as the Marines put it, “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Bushwa, of course, but it was and is that way for me”
― Gary Paulsen, This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs

“I fell off a dogsled down a frozen waterfall and landed on sharp ice on a kneecap. It was so agonizing, I thought, seriously, that my heart would stop. But I found that my whole dog team loved and worried about me so much, they curved downstream and worked back up to me to surround me as I lay clutching my lacerated knee, whimpering and pushing their warm bodies against me. I remember the love, the dog love, much more than the shattered knee. . . .”
― Gary Paulsen, This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs

“I ran from the barn out through the herd to make certain and saw that the coyote was really dead, as was the sheep, but I ran smack into what makes border collies the incredible beings that they are. Louise grabbed at the coyote’s neck, growling, and having made certain that it was dead, tried to bring the sheep back to life. She pulled at the ewe, trying to lift her to her feet, nudged at her ribs in a kind of crude CPR,”
― Gary Paulsen, This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs

“It was, all in all, a grand example of interspecies lack of cooperation and the further illustration that might makes right. I stayed in the rest area, in my car, for another half an hour, until everything had settled down, and saw who emerged as the victor. The bees kept the water fountain.”
― Gary Paulsen, This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs