My Side of the Mountain essays

My Side of the Mountain essays Sam Gribley is tired of living in a crowded New York City apartment with his dad,mom and 8 brothers and sisters, so he runs away looking for his Great-grandfather Gribleys land in the Catskill Mountain wilderness. The Gribley land had not been inhabited by any Gribleys for around 100 years. Sam hitched rides trying to get to the farm. Sam thought he prepared himself for this adventure by reading books in the New York City public library about how to survive on the land. No one in his family took his plans seriously though. With only a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he relied on his own ingenuity and the resources of the land to survive. Sam arrived in the Catskills and went to the Delhi library to find information about Gribleys farm. A nice librarian found information that was very old, this helped Sam find the farm. This was the beginning of Sams great adventure. On his great-grandfathers farm he learns how to survive. At first he struggles to make a fire, then he had trouble whittling wooden fishing hooks to catch fish, but he ended up perfecting the hooks and catching a few fish. He quickly realizes that he needs shelter; just building and staying around a campfire wont do, so he decides to set a fire inside a hemlock tree and hollow himself out a room. Here he builds himself a little hidden home in the forest. His tree home consists of a hidden door made of deerskin, a bed and a fireplace to keep him warn in winter. People come to the forest and are all around him, but they never discover him in his tree home. He struggled every day to find food, only to find that frog legs and turtle soup arent bad food. He also ate wild onions, acorns, apples, wild strawberries, and sometimes rabbit that he manages to catch in some traps he had built. ...