89
" 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
92
" 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