Sam Some Of His Survival Techniques example essay topic

This book is told from the diary of the main character, Sam Gribley. Sam is a boy full of determination. He didn't give up and go home like everyone thought he would. He is strong of mind.

After the first night in the freezing rain, with no fire and no food, he still went on. He is a born survivor. He lasted the winter, through storms, hunger, and loneliness, and came out on top even when everyone expected him to fail. "The land is no place for a Gribley" p. 9 The story starts out with Sam remembering how he first got to be in his tree in the Catskills. A run-away, Sam Gribley, a young boy who lived in New York City with his family of eleven in a small apartment. None of them liked living there.

His father used to talk of the family farm in the Catskill Mountains and the time he ran away to them. Sam decided this would be a way out of the dismal life he had in the city. He prepared himself well by listening very carefully to his father's stories on survival and read books to be prepared for his planned new life. When it was time to go, he took only a penknife, a ball of cord, some flint and steel, forty dollars, and an ax. The flint and steel were for starting fires. He hitched a ride from a trucker to the town; Delhi, nearest the old family farm.

He set out in May, set up a camp in a terrible storm, couldn't get his fire going was tired, and hungry and realized in order to survive he would have to keep his wits about him. When the storm was over he set out to find his great-grandfathers farm. He found some of the old foundation and the carved name on a tree and knew he was on the family compound of his dreams not terribly far from his soon to be home in the Hemlock tree. Some major problems that presented themselves were the elements, hunger, and loneliness. After surviving the terrible storm he knew he needed to build a safe warm haven for himself. He also wanted a spot that would be not noticeable.

He finally decided on an old Hemlock tree where the roots formed a hole and the inner part of the tree was rotting. It took him six months to carve and burn out the Hemlock that would accommodate a bed he made with ash slats and boughs from the Hemlock and a chair for sitting and viewing the weather when it was terrible. As his survival techniques improved he was able to use his intelligence to make traps from birch bark and catch all kinds of animals to eat, among them were rabbits, squirrels, and eventually deer. Some other animals however did not become Sam's dinner, but his friends. The weasel, who when they first met yelled and screamed at him, jumped on him, went to his head, messed it up, screamed and yelled some more and walked away. Sam named him the Baron due to his royal behavior.

Another friend of his was a raccoon, which he dubbed, Jessie Coon James. As I had pointed out before his diet was varied. Among the things he ate were: caught fresh mussels, trout, frogs, turtles, and crayfish. He ate apples, wild strawberries, wild dandelion greens, bloodroots, and cattail roots.

He made salt from boiling birch bark to season his food with. He did manage to retrieve a deer a poacher had shot. That was pretty scary though, as the poacher came to his camp looking for the deer. After skinning the deer he tanned the hide in an old oak stump. He felled the stump, burned a hole in it, and put the deerskin in it for five days, then took it out to dry. He was able to dry deer meat, make a door for his house, made leg straps (called jesse) for Frightful, and used the bones for spearheads.

One day in the woods he noticed a falcon, watched it, felt she had a nest, followed her, climb the steep sheer cliffs, and retrieved a young falcon. The mother came back to the nest just as Sam was taking the bird. She attacked Sam until she discovered there were still two more babies in the nest. Sam named his falcon Frightful, as the experience was just that. Sam was not completely alone in the woods, he had some human as well as animal friends. One day when he was walking the woods Frightful heard something, and seemed nervous, it turned out to be police cars and sirens.

They disappeared as quickly as they appeared and Sam didn't think much about them until entering his home camp he found a man laying on the ground sleeping. Sam thought he was as escaped convict and named him Bando. He turned out to be a teacher at a college on summer break. He called Sam, Thoreau, liked what he saw and stayed the summer camping and showing Sam some of his survival techniques also.

He made a boat for Sam to fish in deep water, made blueberry jam, and best of all pottery from clay, and fired it to store the jam in. When he had to leave to go back to teaching, he promised he would be back at Christmas. Sam felt a terrible void. He realized he hadn't spent much time with his forest friends while Bando was there. He called Frightful, soon Baron weasel came on his rock and a raccoon friend he named Jesse Coon James came to be petted, and he felt more complete. Sam realized fall was approaching as he watched the animals.

Baron weasel was molting and growing a new winter coat. The squirrels were gathering nuts, Jesse raccoon was getting very fat, and Sam started to gather fish and game to smoke for winter food. He gathered apples, roots, and wild rice for winter. It dawned on him one morning when he woke up cold that he needed some way to stay warm. He started softening up hides to make mittens and caught another deer for a shirt and pants. One day while fishing near the spot where Bando found the clay, he knew that he needed a fireplace to keep warm.

The next day he filled his city pants full of clay, dragged home the clay, and started on his fireplace. He had a lot of trouble with it. First with the weight. Baron weasel led him to a long flat rock to hold up the chimney, almost as if he knew what it needed. Once he got it working Sam noticed Frightful was acting sick, so he took her outside to get her some fresh air, and then she suddenly got better.

Sam then realized the fireplace was using up all the room's oxygen. Sam then punched out some ventilation holes in the tree. Sam began to feel lonely with the onset of fall and decided to have a Halloween party for his animal friends by setting out all of their favorite treats. Do you think this was a good idea? No, he lost some of the food he had stored for himself for winter, had a hard time getting rid of them all, they almost destroyed the place and Sam had to build a huge fire to get them to leave. The party had a moral lesson: don't feed wild animals.

When hunting season came, Sam and Frightful stayed home the first two days, as rifle shots were everywhere. When they ventured out they managed to get two more deer from hunters who couldn't find them. Sam made a deer blanket and some rabbit fur underwear. He became lonelier and went into town. There he encountered a young man who called him Daniel Boone and made fun of him. Returning home Sam realized he was almost to the same time as the first storm that he encountered and remembered that he had not gathered wood for the winter.

Almost at a panic he started gathering wood. The days grew shorter. Sam had a lot of time to cook and made some very gourmet meals from wild food, spent time writing in his journal of birch bark and re-read old journal entries. He went to bed early and slept in.

Meanwhile Baron weasel was having a ball in the snow. Sam started thinking of home and neighbors. It fact he started comparing neighbors and birds personalities and matching them to each other. He did this with some of the chickadees. With the approaching of Christmas Sam started to think of his friend Bando, wondering if he was coming. He did.

Christmas Eve, he brought newspapers from New York and Delhi, the nearby town about a wild boy living in the woods. Some deer hunters told he stole their deer, when in reality they couldn't find them. Christmas Day Sam had another visitor, his Dad. He had also read about the wild boy in the woods and felt it must be Sam. When he arrived in Delhi he asked where the sightings of the wild boy were and came to find Sam.

What a wonderful time the three of them had feasting on venison, hot cakes and jam, and wild onion soup with possum. But, the visit had to end and he found himself lonely again. January and February were terrible months. There were terrible ice storms on the mountains, animals died in the snow, and Sam's door froze with ice all around it. Sam felt as if he were living in an igloo. Sam began to feel tired, and his knees stiff and he started to worry.

Frightful had a hard time finding things to eat. The deer were without food; Sam went out to cut hemlock limbs for them. More deer came for food. In February Frightful caught a rabbit.

Sam cooked it and craved the liver. After eating all the liver he felt better and came to realize he had not had fresh greens or sunshine all winter and needed vitamin C&D. It was the lack of these vitamins that was causing him to be tired and achy. And then in late February the cycle started to end, the sun was up. The deer disappeared. The horned owl had eggs.

Spring was in the air. The animals were mating, the insects were appearing, and the valleys were turning green. One morning as Sam was working with Frightful a young boy named Matt Spell came in search of a story about the wild boy. Matt seemed to be about fourteen and worked after school for a newspaper in Poughkeepsie. He thought if he wrote about Sam they would make a reporter of him. Sam told him a phony story but Matt didn't buy it.

After begging him not to tell anyone about him Matt agreed to print the phony story if he would let him come back at Easter. Sam had many more visitors after that. Sam met a man named Aaron who came to the Catskills for Passover. Then Bando and Matt came for Easter, and decided Sam needed a guesthouse for his company. Not long after, Dad came, then the reporters wanting to know about the boy from New York who went to the Catskills to live off the land.

And the visitors kept coming. And finally his whole family, this was the climax of the book. It was the end of Sam's solitary life on the mountain, living independently. They all talked about building a house. Sam realized the runaway trip was over and the city came to him and his family was here to stay. Mom told him until he was eighteen he had to stay.

The theme of this book is growing up and finding your own path in life. Sam set out to live on his own, be independent. Along the way he grew up, and so did Frightful. The bond between the two grew immensely also. .".. She had learned a whistle meant "come". " P. 63 " "We are going to have a house", he said...

"A House! You " ll spoil everything!" p. 176 Amazon. com Every kid thinks about running away at one point or another; few get farther than the end of the block. Young Sam Gribley gets to the end of the block and keeps going -- all the way to the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. There he sets up house in a huge hollowed-out tree, with a falcon and a weasel for companions and his wits as his tool for survival. In a spellbinding, touching, funny account, Sam learns to live off the land, and grows up a little in the process.

Blizzards, hunters, loneliness, and fear all battle to drive Sam back to city life. But his desire for freedom, independence, and adventure is stronger. No reader will be immune to the compulsion to go right out and start whittling fishhooks and befriending raccoons. Jean Craighead George, author of more than 80 children's books, including the Newbery Medal-winning Julie of the Wolves, created another prizewinner with My Side of the Mountain -- a Newbery Honor Book, an ALA Notable Book, and a Hans Christian Andersen Award Honor Book. Astonishingly, she wrote its sequel, On the Far Side of the Mountain, 30 years later, and a decade after that penned the final book in the trilogy, Frightful's Mountain, told from the falcon's point of view.

George has no doubt shaped generations of young readers with her outdoor adventures of the mind and spirit. (Ages 9 to 12) -- Emilie Coulter Ingram In this enthralling story, a boy builds a treehouse in the mountains and learns to live entirely by his wits. ' (Emphasizes) the rewards of courage and determination. ' -- The Horn Book. I agree with it being an enthralling story.

It has influenced many lives, and in many different ways. One way is that it has encouraged people to take up falconry. One good example would be Robert Kennedy Junior. He and a group of falconry friends all have said that her book has contributed to them being falconers today. I myself am considering the sport now. I also agree with the statement "No reader will be immune to the compulsion to go right out and start whittling fishhooks and befriending raccoons".

I can't vouch for the entire population of people who have read this book but I will say that that was my personal feelings. I even tried making some hooks once. It didn't go so well.