Brief Summary of School Reading List Books - Ievgen Sykalo 2026

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George

Part I: A Wild Idea and the Call of the Mountains

I ran away from home—not in the way kids say it when they sulk in the corner for ten minutes. I really ran away, with nothing but a flint and steel, a penknife, some cord, a ball of string, and the clothes on my back. My name is Sam Gribley, and I left behind the roar of New York City, the cramped apartment, my many siblings, and the slow grind of life to answer a calling deep in my bones—a yearning for the wild.

They said I couldn’t do it. That I’d starve, freeze, be eaten by bears or bugs or worse. But my heart beat a rhythm they couldn’t hear, and in it was the song of the Catskill Mountains, where my great-grandfather once owned a patch of land. That’s where I went. Alone. At fourteen.

My parents, too tired or too distracted to believe I was serious, barely looked up from their dinner plates when I told them. So I left, boarded a bus north, and walked the last miles to the edge of my future. I had no tent. No real survival experience. Just a head stuffed with books from the library and a stubborn streak a mile wide.

The trees were old and whispering, the ground soft and wild underfoot. Here, I thought, I can breathe.

Part II: The Making of a Mountain Boy

Nature does not coddle. The first night was cold and terrifying, the darkness absolute, the sounds of the forest like a symphony of ghosts and teeth. I tried to light a fire and failed. My first meal was a bitter root and a berry I wasn’t quite sure of.

But the land teaches, if you’re humble enough to learn.

I found the foundation of my great-grandfather’s old farm near a stream, moss-covered and half-swallowed by the forest. This was mine now. I dug out a home in a hollowed-out hemlock tree, its heart long rotted away, and made it snug with packed mud, stones, leaves, and branches. My very own tree-house—only it wasn’t perched in the boughs, but rooted in the earth like an old secret.

I learned to fish by hand, to catch frogs, to trap animals, to skin and cure their hides. I read a pocket guide on edible plants until the pages turned soft from use. I tamed the land in small ways, not by force, but by slow understanding. I began to feel like one of the animals—watchful, lean, alive.

And then came Frightful.

She was a young peregrine falcon, barely feathered when I stole her from her nest high on the cliffside. I trained her carefully, feeding her bits of liver and meat, speaking gently, asking her—begging her, really—to trust me. She did.

Frightful became my eyes in the sky, my hunter, my friend. We flew together in a way—not with wings, but with a bond of silence and shared wildness. She was fierce, proud, and loyal, and I loved her more than anything else in those woods.

There was also The Baron Weasel, who lived beneath the roots of a stump near my tree. He was like the forest itself—sly, solitary, and unpredictable. We were rivals, then cautious neighbors, then something like companions. I came to admire his swagger.

The months passed like a dream stitched together by sweat, trial, and wonder. I made acorn pancakes, roasted fish, brewed sassafras tea. I survived the summer. I grew lean and strong and bronze. The boy who left New York was gone. I was a creature of bark and bone now.

Part III: Ghosts, Visitors, and the Weight of Silence

But solitude has sharp edges. It cuts in the quiet.

Sometimes, I'd talk to Frightful or The Baron like they could answer. Other times, I’d miss the sound of a human voice so badly it ached like hunger. Then came the first visitors.

One was a lost hiker, flabbergasted to find a boy cooking a turtle stew in the middle of the woods. I offered him dinner, and he left shaking his head, probably wondering if he'd stumbled into a legend.

Another was a professor named Bando. He came wandering through and found me reading by my fire. We struck up a strange friendship. He didn’t report me. He stayed a few days. Helped me improve my fireplace, shared stories, and listened without judgment. He called me “Thoreau with a beard.” I laughed. My beard was barely fuzz.

Then, most curiously, Bando returned. Again and again. He brought books and supplies and news of the world beyond the mountains. With him came a faint tug of homesickness, like a distant bell ringing from a land I’d once belonged to.

Still, I remained.

Winter came with knives of wind and white silence. The cold seeped into every crack of my shelter. I smoked venison and fish, lined my bed with furs, and huddled with Frightful close at night. Snow buried the world, and I learned to walk atop it, like a ghost of the boy I had been.

Yet there were moments of joy. Icicles sparkling like glass chandeliers. Deer prints crisp in the snow. My own laughter echoing against the stillness when a squirrel surprised me by leaping from a branch like a tiny acrobat.

Part IV: A World Pressing In

The more time I spent alone, the more I came to understand things I couldn’t have in the city. That silence is not empty—it’s full of meaning. That food tastes better when you earn it. That being alone does not always mean being lonely, but sometimes, it does.

People began to notice. Word got out. "The wild boy of the Catskills," they said in whispers. Reporters and hikers came looking. I’d hide, ducking under roots or behind rocks, breath shallow, like prey.

But part of me wondered—how long could I hide? How long could I keep my world, this world, untouched by the noise and flash of everything I had left behind?

One day, my family came. Not with anger, but with awe. My father saw what I had built, how I had changed. There was pride in his eyes. My younger siblings wandered my woods like tourists. My mother wept. I knew then that something had shifted. I was no longer entirely of the wild.

The mountain had given me something I hadn't even known I needed: not escape, but discovery. Not flight, but freedom. And the understanding that we carry our wildness within us, no matter where we live.

Part V: Between Two Worlds

I did not leave the mountain. Not truly. But I stopped hiding.

I built a guest shelter, let Bando visit often. I even helped my family build a small home on the edge of the woods. I shared my secrets—the best fishing pools, the hiding places of sweet roots, the ways the deer walked.

But my tree remained mine.

And Frightful? She flew now, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, but always returned. She was wild too, yet bound to me by something more than tether or food. Something deep. Love, maybe.

I am Sam Gribley. I ran to the woods and found myself not by conquering nature, but by becoming part of it. And though the world may call me back with roads and clocks and noise, the mountain is in my bones now. Forever.

Part VI: The Soul of a Tree, the Heart of a Boy

The seasons rolled on. Spring uncoiled from winter like a slow breath. The snow melted into song, trickling down rocks, breathing life into the streams. Buds pushed from branches like promises. And I, still living in my hemlock tree, began to feel something I hadn't expected—roots.

Not tree roots, though mine had become like that grand old hemlock’s, nestled deep in the loam. No, I mean the kind of roots that grow inside you, quietly, when you love a place so much it becomes part of your heartbeat. The mountain had gone from a hiding place to a home. The wilderness, once a mystery, had become familiar as a brother.

Every day had its rhythm. I rose with the sun or sometimes before it, when mist still coiled around the trees like ghosts of old loggers. I fed Frightful, stretched my limbs, drank the cold, fresh stream water. I tended to my traps, foraged greens and nuts, patched up my clothes. Each act was small but holy, like a prayer to the life I’d chosen.

And yet—I felt the wind change.

There were more people now. A footprint here. A voice echoing off the ridge. Litter sometimes, left like a wound. The world was pressing in. It didn’t mean harm, not exactly, but it didn’t understand either. It came with cameras and curiosity and chatter. The kind of attention that makes you a thing to be watched instead of a boy trying to live his truth.

I wrestled with it.

Should I stay hidden forever, a hermit boy in the hills, or should I let the world in, little by little, until my solitude became shared?

I didn’t know.

Part VII: The Echoes Within

There was a day—still crisp with spring air—when I sat at the edge of a cliff, looking down into the valley, and something inside me cracked open. Not like a break, but more like a seed splitting, preparing to grow.

I thought of Thoreau, of course. I had read Walden so many times the pages blurred into my dreams. But he left the woods. Returned to society. Brought with him a deeper knowing.

Could I do the same?

But the thought made my chest tight. Leave this mountain? This tree? Frightful? The Baron? Even the bitter winter winds that howled through my cracks and shook my very bones?

I thought about my family, too—how they looked at me with something between pride and worry. My younger sister wanted to learn to snare rabbits; my mother wanted me to eat more than acorn mash. My father, though—he understood. He saw that I had become someone else out here, someone older, deeper.

I didn’t want to lose him—the boy I’d become. But I also didn’t want to shut the door forever.

Frightful landed on my arm just then, her wings flaring like a banner of freedom. She looked at me, fierce and still, as if she knew exactly what I was thinking. Maybe she did.

Because wildness, I was learning, wasn’t always a place. Sometimes it was a way of being, of seeing. It was in your choices. In your courage.

Part VIII: The Wild Inside

Summer came again, golden and full of song. I taught my siblings to climb trees, to name birds by their cries, to roast cattail roots until they tasted like corn. I let my mother visit my tree and, though she winced at the lack of curtains and floorboards, she smiled. She saw me—really saw me—for the first time in years.

The news folk still came sometimes, snapping photos, asking questions, writing headlines like “Teen Lives Off the Land—Modern-Day Daniel Boone!” But I stopped hiding. I stood in the open, looked them in the eye, and spoke my truth.

“I’m not here to impress you,” I’d say. “I’m here because this is who I am.”

And that was enough.

I started carving things—bowls, whistles, even words into bark. I wanted to leave something behind, not for others, but for the land itself. My tree—my glorious hemlock—stood taller each day, it seemed. Not because it grew, but because I looked at it with awe, not desperation.

Bando brought me a journal one day, bound in leather, with paper thick and cream-colored. “Write it down,” he told me. “Before the world gets too noisy and you forget what the quiet taught you.”

So I did.

I wrote about the time I chased a raccoon into a ravine. About the storm that nearly tore my door away. About the first time I tasted wild strawberry and thought I’d found paradise. I wrote about loneliness, too—the kind that visits like fog, without warning—and about joy, fierce and sudden as a hawk’s dive.

I wrote the mountain.

Part IX: A Home, a Haven, a Horizon

I still live on the mountain. But not alone. My family, now part-wild themselves, built a small home just beyond the rise. Bando visits every few weeks, bringing books and laughter. My youngest brother knows the name of every bird in the valley. And sometimes, when the wind is just right, Frightful circles above me, her cry like a trumpet of the sky.

People ask if I’ll go back to the city, finish school, get a job. And maybe, someday, I will. But I’ll never leave. Because I’ve learned something most people never do:

The world is loud, but the forest whispers. And if you learn to listen—truly listen—it tells you everything you need to know.

It tells you how to live. How to love. How to be.

Not do, not achieve, not impress—but simply be.

My Side of the Mountain is not just a tale of survival. It’s a song of selfhood, a poem of pine needles and falcon wings, a testament to the wilderness that lives both outside and within. Sam Gribley didn’t run away from home. He ran toward something—something real, raw, and radiant.

And if you listen closely, you’ll hear it calling you, too.

—End—