NOVEL EXCERPT

from My Side
of the Mountain
Jean Craighead George

About the Author

Award-winning novelist, nonfiction writer, short-story writer, and memoirist
Jean Craighead George (1919–2012) was born in Washington, D.C. A
naturalist as much as an author, George wrote more than 100 books about
the natural world, most of them for children. Her best-known works are
Julie of the Wolves (1972) and My Side of the Mountain (1959).

BACKGROUND
In My Side of the Mountain, young Sam Gribley runs away from his
home in New York City to live in the Catskill Mountains on his own.
With only a few basic tools and the advice of some locals, he does
what he can to gather food and prepare shelter before the winter. This
excerpt begins in the summer, shortly after Sam has arrived.

NOTES
1

I knew enough about the Catskill Mountains to know that when

the summer came, they were covered with people. Although
Great-grandfather’s farm was somewhat remote, still hikers and
campers and hunters and fishermen were sure to wander across it. Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved.
2 Therefore I wanted a house that could not be seen. People
would want to take me back where I belonged if they found me.
3 I looked at that tree. Somehow I knew it was home, but I was
not quite sure how it was home. The limbs were high and not
right for a tree house. I could build a bark extension around it, but
that would look silly. Slowly I circled the great trunk. Halfway
around the whole plan became perfectly obvious. To the west,
between two of the flanges1 of the tree that spread out to be roots,
was a cavity. The heart of the tree was rotting away. I scraped at
it with my hands; old, rotten insect-ridden dust came tumbling
out. I dug on and on, using my ax from time to time as my
excitement grew.
1. flanges (FLAN jihz) n. raised edges at the base of a tree.

IL1 UNIT 4 Independent Learning • from My Side of the Mountain

 4 With much of the old rot out, I could crawl in the tree and sit
cross-legged. Inside I felt as cozy as a turtle in its shell. I chopped NOTES

and chopped until I was hungry and exhausted. I was now in

the hard good wood, and chopping it out was work. I was afraid
December would come before I got a hole big enough to lie in. So I
sat down to think.
5 You know, those first days, I just never planned right. I had
the beginnings of a home, but not a bite to eat, and I had worked
so hard that I could hardly move forward to find that bite.
Furthermore, it was discouraging to feed that body of mine. It
was never satisfied, and gathering food for it took time and got it
hungrier. Trying to get a place to rest it took time and got it more
tired, and I really felt I was going in circles and wondered how
primitive man ever had enough time and energy to stop hunting
food and start thinking about fire and tools.
6 I left the tree and went across the meadow looking for food. I
plunged into the woods beyond, and there I discovered the gorge
and the white cascade splashing down the black rocks into the
pool below.
7 I was hot and dirty. I scrambled down the rocks and slipped
into the pool. It was so cold I yelled. But when I came out on the
bank and put on my two pairs of trousers2 and three sweaters,
which I thought was a better way to carry clothes than in a pack,
I tingled and burned and felt coltish.3 I leapt up the bank, slipped,
and my face went down in a patch of dogtooth violets.
8 You would know them anywhere after a few looks at them at
the Botanical Gardens4 and in colored flower books. They are little
yellow lilies on long slender stems with oval leaves dappled with
gray. But that’s not all. They have wonderfully tasty bulbs. I was
filling my pockets before I got up from my fall.
9 “I’ll have a salad type lunch,” I said as I moved up the steep
sides of the ravine. I discovered that as late as it was in the season,
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the spring beauties were still blooming in the cool pockets of the
woods. They are all right raw, that is if you are as hungry as I was.
They taste a little like lima beans. I ate these as I went on hunting
food, feeling better and better, until I worked my way back to the
meadow where the dandelions were blooming. Funny I hadn’t
noticed them earlier. Their greens are good, and so are their
roots—a little strong and milky, but you get used to that.
10 A crow flew into the aspen grove without saying a word.
The little I knew of crows from following them in Central Park,
they always have something to say. But this bird was sneaking,
obviously trying to be quiet. Birds are good food. Crow is

2. trousers (TROW zuhrz) n. pants.

3. coltish (KOHL tihsh) adj. like a colt; energetic but awkward.
4. Botanical Gardens refers to one of the large public gardens in New York City.

UNIT 4 Independent Learning • from My Side of the Mountain IL2

 certainly not the best, but I did not know that then, and I launched
NOTES out to see where it was going. I had a vague plan to try to noose5
it. This is the kind of thing I wasted time on in those days when
time was so important. However, this venture turned out all right,
because I did not have to noose that bird.
11 I stepped into the woods, looked around, could not see the
crow, but noticed a big stick nest in a scrabbly pine. I started to
climb the tree. Off flew the crow. What made me keep on climbing
in face of such discouragement, I don’t know, but I did, and that
noon I had crow eggs and wild salad for lunch.
12 At lunch I also solved the problem of carving out my tree. After
a struggle I made a fire. Then I sewed a big skunk cabbage leaf
into a cup with grass strands. I had read that you can boil water
in a leaf, and ever since then I had been very anxious to see if this
were true. It seems impossible, but it works. I boiled the eggs in
a leaf. The water keeps the leaf wet, and although the top dries
up and bums down to the water level, that’s as far as the burning
goes. I was pleased to see it work.
13 Then here’s what happened. Naturally, all this took a lot of
time, and I hadn’t gotten very far on my tree, so I was fretting and
stamping out the fire when I stopped with my foot in the air.
The fire! Indians made dugout canoes with fire. They burned
them out, an easier and much faster way of getting results. I
would try fire in the tree. If I was very careful, perhaps it would
work. I ran into the hemlock forest with a burning stick and got a
fire going inside the tree.
14 Thinking that I ought to have a bucket of water in case things
got out of hand, I looked desperately around me. The water was
far across the meadow and down the ravine. This would never do.
I began to think the whole inspiration of a home in the tree was no
good. I really did have to live near water for cooking and drinking
and comfort. I looked sadly at the magnificent hemlock and was

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about to put the fire out and desert it when I said something to
myself. It must have come out of some book: “Hemlocks usually
grow around mountain streams and springs.”
15 I swirled on my heel. Nothing but boulders around me. But the
air was damp, somewhere—I said—and darted around the rocks,
peering and looking and sniffing and going down into pockets
and dales. No water. I was coming back, circling wide, when I
almost fell in it. Two sentinel boulders, dripping wet, decorated
with flowers, ferns, moss, weeds—everything that loved water—
guarded a bathtub-sized spring.
16 “You pretty thing,” I said, flopped on my stomach, and pushed
my face into it to drink. I opened my eyes. The water was like
glass, and in it were little insects with oars. They rowed away

5. noose v. catch with a loop of string or rope.

IL3 UNIT 4 Independent Learning • from My Side of the Mountain

 from me. Beetles skittered like bullets on the surface, or carried
a silver bubble of air with them to the bottom. Ha, then I saw a NOTES

crayfish.
17 I jumped up, overturned rocks, and found many crayfish. At
first I hesitated to grab them because they can pinch. I gritted my
teeth, thought about how much more it hurts to be hungry, and
came down upon them. I did get pinched, but I had my dinner.
And that was the first time I had planned ahead! Any planning
that I did in those early days was such a surprise to me and so
successful that I was delighted with even a small plan. I wrapped
the crayfish in leaves, stuffed them in my pockets, and went back
to the burning tree.
18 Bucket of water, I thought. Bucket of water? Where was I going
to get a bucket? How did I think, even if I found water, I could
get it back to the tree? That’s how citified I was in those days. I
had never lived without a bucket before—scrub buckets, water
buckets—and so when a water problem came up, I just thought I
could run to the kitchen and get a bucket.
19 “Well, dirt is as good as water,” I said as I ran back to my tree.
“I can smother the fire with dirt.”
20 Days passed working, burning, cutting, gathering food, and
each day I cut another notch on an aspen pole that I had stuck in
the ground for a calendar. ❧

“The Old, Old Tree,” from My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, copyright © 1959, renewed © 1987 by Jean
Craighead George. Used by permission of Dutton Children’s Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC.
Copyright © SAVVAS Learning Company LLC. All Rights Reserved.

UNIT 4 Independent Learning • from My Side of the Mountain IL4