Frightful becomes a magnificent bird and an accomplished hunter, and Sam has soon added rabbit and pheasant to his standard diet as well as the loyal companionship of a wild raptor. He plucks a chick from its cliff-side scrape and, with guidance from library books in the closest town, sets out to train her. Seeing a peregrine falcon soaring above, Sam is inspired to become a falconer to ensure a consistent meat supply.

His menu is remarkably varied – dogtooth violet bulb and dandelion greens salad, fresh water mussels, hickory nuts, crow eggs, baked cattail roots, turtles, trout, mushrooms, venison jerky, sassafras and pennyroyal tea, wild strawberries, and May apples. He spends most of his time, as hunter gatherers invariably do, finding food for subsistence. He fashions deerskin clothes from road kill or animals abandoned by hunters. He creates a snug home in the core of an old-growth hemlock tree. Over the course of a year, he learns the skills necessary to lead a self-sufficient life in the forest. Young Sam Gribley, with the blessing of his parents, runs away from their home in New York City and settles on his great-grandfather’s abandoned farm in the Catskills, taking with him a penknife, ball of cord, ax, flint and steel, and $40. My Side of the Mountain is the first of a trilogy, written over a 40 year period, that includes On the Far Side of the Mountain and Frightful’s Mountain. If tiny Drum can survive, so can she.My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George His ability to survive serves as an unintended motivator for Frightful. Importance: As Frightful tends to the motherless eyases of Chup, she comes to discover that, for Drum being small and loving of his parents, he is tougher than he lets on.

This demonstrates just how desperately Frightful wants to return to Sam.

She and Sam have a symbiotic relationship where they depend on each other, and Frightful first believes that they need each other to survive. Frightful’s sole focus at the beginning of the novel is to return home, to Sam. Importance: At the beginning of the novel, Frightful has been kidnapped and freed, and later allowed to remain free by Sam. Frightful was an excellent hunter who rarely missed.

Frightful's mountain book