Cruelest Miles Annotation Assignment

Winter Break Annotation Assignment: The Cruelest Miles 1. “Allan left behind a vivid description of mushing in a blizzard. On the final ninety-mile stretch to Nome during the sweepstakes, his team was enveloped in ‘air thick as smoke with whirling snow. Gritty as salt it was, and stinging like splinters of steel. It baked into my furs and into the coats of my dogs, until we were encased in snow crusts solid as ice. The din deafened me. I couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. I felt as if the dogs and I were fighting all the devilish elements in the universe.’ Every fifteen minutes, Allan stopped his team and crawled up the gang line, putting a hand on each dog to bury themselves beneath the snow, but every time Allen reached the front of the team, he found the leader, Baldy, ‘sturdy and brave as a little polar bear... a small brave bit of life in that vast, storm-swept waste.... I’d melt the ice away from his face and hug him,’ and then fumble back to the sled. ‘I was so darned proud and happy over that pup I just couldn’t find the words to tell him what I thought of him,’ Allan said. Kaasen too would have trouble finding the words to describe the courage of his own leader, Balto” (Salisbury 221). In this passage, Salisbury uses a plethora of imagery to emphasize the harsh conditions of the arctic. His usage of figurative language, especially similes, such as “gritty as salt” and “thick as smoke” sets the scene so that the reader truly creates the image of an impossible, freezing tundra in their head. The author also bounces back and forth between figurative comparisons and plain, literal language in this excerpt, which creates a thorough understanding for the author’s situation. When Salisbury says the snow was “stinging like splinters of steel,” the reader automatically associates it with immense pain and discomfort; furthermore, when he says he and the dogs were literally "encased in snow crusts” shortly after, it shifts the reader’s mind to a more

Cited: 1. Salisbury, Gay., and Laney Salisbury. The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Againstan Epidemic. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Warning: These citations may not always be 100% accurate.