My Side of the Mountain

Summary

My Side of the Mountain is the first-person record of Sam Gribley, a boy of about twelve who leaves his family's crowded New York City apartment to live alone for a year in the Catskill Mountains. Sam had told his father he meant to go to the old Gribley farm, land his great-grandfather once worked near the town of Delhi, and his father laughed and let him try, sure he would be back by morning. Sam sets out in May with a penknife, a ball of cord, an ax, flint and steel, and forty dollars. His first night, cold and wet, he cannot make a fire and catches only a fish he cannot cook, and he learns quickly how little he knows. In Delhi the librarian, Miss Turner, helps him find old maps that locate the Gribley land and books on edible plants. On the mountain Sam chooses an enormous hemlock and burns and carves out its hollow trunk into a room with a bed, a clay fireplace and a deerskin door. He gathers acorns, cattail roots, wild greens and berries, fishes, traps, and learns to smoke and store meat. His boldest act is climbing to a falcon's nest on a cliff and taking a young peregrine, which he names Frightful and trains with jesses and a leash to hunt for him. He watches and names the animals around him: a fierce weasel he calls the Baron, and a raccoon, Jessie Coon James, who raids his stores. In summer a lost college English teacher stumbles on his camp; Sam first takes him for a fugitive and nicknames him Bando, and the two become friends, making blueberry jam before Bando leaves. Through the autumn hunting season Sam salvages deer left by hunters, tans their hides for clothing, and lays in food for winter. Winter brings deep snow, loneliness and a near disaster when smoke from his fire inside the sealed tree almost overcomes him, so that he cuts a vent. At Christmas Bando returns and Sam's father comes up the mountain to visit. By spring newspapers are printing rumours of a wild boy in the Catskills, and visitors begin to find him, among them a boy Sam calls Mr. Jacket and a young reporter, Matt Spell. The book ends when Sam's whole family arrives to stay, intending to build a house on the land, and Sam, who has begun to want company, accepts that his solitary year is over. George wrote and illustrated the novel with pen drawings of Sam's tools, traps and plants; E. P. Dutton published it in 1959, and it received a Newbery Honor in 1960.

Top Lessons

• Knowledge before courage

  Sam's first night on the mountain is a failure because wanting to live in the woods is not the same as knowing how. Everything that works for him later comes from patient study: library books, observation of animals, and trial and error with fire, traps and stored food.

• Work makes a home

  The hemlock is only a tree until Sam burns, scrapes and furnishes it, and the winter is survivable only because he worked all autumn. The book shows that a home is something made with care and labour, season by season.

• Alone, but not meant to stay alone

  Sam goes to the mountain to be on his own, yet he names the animals, welcomes Bando, and is glad when his father climbs up at Christmas. By spring he finds he wants people again, and the family's arrival ends the story happily rather than as a defeat.

• Taking and tending

  Sam lives by taking from the land: a falcon from its nest, fish, game and plants. He also cares for what he takes, training Frightful patiently and using every part of the deer he salvages, so his life on the mountain is both hunting and keeping.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book has no physicians and no illness plot, but it is attentive to the body's needs in the wild. Sam's diet of foraged plants, fish and game is described closely, and the winter section turns on his struggle to keep fed and warm. The episode in which smoke from the fire inside the closed tree nearly overcomes him is a children's-book account of what would now be called carbon monoxide or smoke inhalation; the book treats it as a lesson in ventilation rather than a medical event. Any reading of Sam's late-winter cravings as a nutritional deficiency should be offered as an interpretation.

• Winter chapters

  Sam grows drowsy and nearly passes out from the fire's smoke in the sealed hemlock, then cuts a vent.

• Early and autumn chapters

  Sam's foraging, fishing and food storage, from his hungry first night to the stores he lays up for winter.