Northwind by Gary Paulsen

Northwind is a survival tale set along the coast of Norway. It tells the fictional tale of an orphan boy named Leif who goes on a journey north after yet another life-altering event.

Leif's mother died giving birth to him and his father died fighting a whale. No one could remember their names, so he was called Leif. He was born with a blood clot in his fist foretelling a life of hardship and danger. On the docks, Leif was nursed by sucking on rags dipped in sour goat's milk and fish oil. When he was old enough to walk, Leif was taken on the boats to work, moving from boat to boat to boat. As he grew, he was made to work repairing nets and cooking eel meat. These ships hunted seals for their fur and meat. To find the best seals whose fur was the thickest, the boats had to go north.

When he was twelve-years-old, the ship set up an isolated fish camp where they left Leif, and "four used-up and part-crippled old men -- one named Carl" and a small boy named little Carl. They were to fish and smoke salmon while the ship travelled north to hunt seals. They smoked and dried enough to last at least six months, but the ship never returned.

 

The men made a small cedar canoe but now they knew they needed a larger canoe. To that end they felled a tree to begin making a dugout canoe. It was at this time that the dark ship came. The dark ship, was a wooden ship with dirty slack sails that drifted in during the fog. Its foul stink of death could be smelled before it was seen. The ship came into the cove during the night and in the morning four dirty men arrived on shore in a small boat. No one knew what the men from the dark ship were trying to tell them. When their ship began to drift back out, the men raced back to their ship. Old Carl said, "They are men who have lost their shadows."

Eight days after the dark ship's arrival, the men in the camp began to sicken and die. When Old Carl became ill he placed Leif and Little Carl, along with food and supplies into the cedar canoe. He told Leif to go north and to never return to the camp. Leif was scared to go off into the wilderness but he did what Old Carl told him. He paddled hard all the first day. However, the death that stalked the dark ship and the camp now found the canoe. First Little Carl sickened, vomiting and feverish, and then soon Leif was overcome too. 

As he became sicker, Leif saw that Little Carl had passed away, his spirit had gone to Valhalla. But he was too weak and he sank into darkness. While he was unconscious with the illness, a pod of black and white whales came upon the canoe and decided to play with it. Eventually, one of the mother whales pushed the canoe onto a rocky beach out of reach of the young whales.

Leif alone survived the illness. After cleaning himself, eating and drinking a little, and washing out the canoe, he set out to find a place to bury Little Carl, a place where the animals could not reach the boy's body. Once this task was completed, Leif set out northward, as Old Carl had instructed. It was to be a voyage of learning and change. And a voyage of freedom.

Discussion

 

Gary Paulsen, master of the survival-story, has written another brilliant novel, set centuries earlier off the coast of Norway. The inspiration for Northwind came from the stories Paulsen was told by his grandmother at a cook camp in northern Minnesota. Paulsen's grandmother was from Norway and her childhood had been spent by the sea. In his Author's Note, Paulsen writes of those stories, "...she told unforgettable stories of the sea, so real I could smell the salt and hear the creaking of rope and wood and picture North Sea waves so huge they raged far overhead and turned longboats into warping wooden sleds as they raced down the roaring-boiling face of water." Paulsen would become a sailor once day, sailing along the western coast of North America and also into the Pacific.

The event that triggers Leif's own voyage is the arrival of cholera at the fish camp. Centuries ago, cholera was a death sentence: few survived the illness, and it often led to a horrible, swift death. Leif does survive and trades his existence as a virtual slave on fishing boats to one of complete freedom and daring survival.

 

Paulsen describes many survival skills and wildlife behaviours in Northwind. For example, he explains how Leif fashions a fish spear from a willow branch and the metal tang that Old Carl gave him, allowing him to hunt for food. Later on when he loses this valuable too, Paulsen describes how Leif makes a spear that doesn't have the metal tang, and how he adapts it when it doesn't quite work. There's a great description of killer whales creating a "bubble net" to herd salmon so they can easily feast on the trapped fish with the eagles and ravens picking up the scraps. 

 

In Northwind, Leif follows Old Carl's directive and travels "north". On this journey Leif encounters many situations and experiences, some of them life-threatening but through each, a learning experience that helps him to grow. What saves him is his ability to learn from his mistakes. Leif learns about the currents between the islands and islets after he almost loses his life, the cedar canoe and the few possessions he has, in a whirlpool. He learns to look for bear scat when he comes ashore, after coming face to face with a huge brown bear. Leif learns to observe the sea and understand its features so he can safely navigate along the coast. This is important for when he moves further north and encounters inlets and strong sea currents.

As a result of his experiences, Leif begins to understand that he is "...learning to learn: knowing more...As he moved north, saw more, lived more, he knew one thing for certain. He was the smallest part of everything he passed through....So he wasn't bigger. But he was still more in some way. Had grown so that he was truly different from the orphan boy in the ships and he knew, believed and knew, that he would never be that boy again. That nothing on Odin's earth could make him become that again."

It is Leif's experience of freedom that ultimately changes him and gives him hope for the future. At the beginning of his journey, Leif remembers what his life was like, when he had been shuffled from one ship to the next, "...a kind of galley thrall. Always down below, working at menial tasks:...dodging beatings that any man on the crew could administer to him for any reason whatsoever."  Now there was danger, from bears and the ocean but..." ...it was all up to him. He could eat or starve, depending on his own actions, his own thoughts, his own plans."  Leif demonstrates he is resilient and courageous. He has grit and is willing to learn. These traits are what enable him to survive.

When he was a slave on the ships, Leif remembers wanting to "...jump over the side and let the sharks have him.."  But Old Carl had stopped him with the suggestion that things might change and that they might get better. Near the end of the novel, Leif finds himself considering what he might do if he should spot a ship with men and he decides that at this time he does not want to return to that world just yet and that he wants to continue to learn.

 

Northwind is another excellent survival story for readers who may have enjoyed the author's Hatchet series.

Book Details:

Northwind by Gary Paulsen
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers    2022
246 pp.