Part 3
One day, watching the sky, Sam sees a peregrine falcon slicing through the air, and an idea seizes him: if he could raise a falcon, he could train it to hunt game and help feed him through the coming winter. It is a bold, difficult plan. To get a young bird he must climb to a falcon’s nest high on a sheer cliff face — a genuinely terrifying climb, with the parent falcons diving and screaming at the intruder. Heart pounding, Sam reaches the ledge and carefully takes one nestling. The experience is so frightening that he names the little bird ‘Frightful.’ Then begins the patient, ancient art of training a bird of prey. Sam learns falconry mostly on his own, from library books and trial and error: he feeds Frightful by hand, keeps her close, teaches her to sit on his fist and to return to him, and slowly wins her trust. As the weeks pass, Frightful grows into a swift, deadly hunter who catches rabbits and pheasants and brings them back — and, just as importantly, into Sam’s dearest companion. In a life of solitude, the falcon becomes his partner, his friend, and a living answer to the loneliness of the wild. Sam is no longer entirely alone on his mountain.
| Section | What you will practice |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Falcon words: falcon, talon, tame, companion, perilous… |
| Literary Elements | The bold plan, a bond formed, and loneliness answered |
| Cross-Curricular | The peregrine falcon and the ancient art of falconry |
| Ch. | What happens |
|---|---|
| Chapters 7–8 | The Cliff Climb — Sam decides to raise a falcon to help him hunt; he makes a terrifying climb to a cliff nest and takes a nestling he names Frightful. |
| Chapter 9 | Training Frightful — through patient falconry, Sam teaches the young peregrine to hunt and return to him; she becomes a deadly hunter and his dearest companion. |
The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal on Earth, reaching over 380 kilometres an hour in a hunting dive called a stoop. Everything about the bird serves that dive. It folds into a teardrop shape, and small bony cones inside each nostril slow the incoming air so it can still breathe at speed. A third eyelid, the nictitating membrane, sweeps across the eye to clean and protect it without blinding the bird. Peregrines strike prey in mid-air with clenched feet. Their recent history is also a landmark in conservation: the pesticide DDT thinned their eggshells so badly that they vanished from the eastern United States by the 1960s, and after the chemical was banned, captive breeding restored them so completely that they now nest on city skyscrapers, which suit them because tall ledges and abundant pigeons are exactly what a peregrine wants.
ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.
Falconry is the practice of hunting with a trained bird of prey, and it is at least three thousand years old, with roots across Central Asia and the Middle East. Its central insight is that a hawk is never tamed in the way a dog is. It stays because it is fed, so the whole craft turns on weight: a falconer weighs the bird daily and flies it at a precise hunting weight, heavy enough to be strong and light enough to be interested in returning. The vocabulary is old enough to have entered English — a bird taken from the wild is a haggard, one raised from the nest an eyas, and to fly free without a tether is to be at hack. Modern falconry is tightly regulated because the birds are protected, so nearly everywhere it requires a licence, an inspected facility and an experienced sponsor before anyone may keep a hawk.
- He takes a nestling and names her Frightful.
- Frightful becomes a hunter and his closest companion.
- Sam spots a peregrine falcon and forms a plan.
- He climbs the dangerous cliff to the nest.
- He patiently trains her through falconry.
Personification gives human qualities to an animal, object or force, and nature writing depends on it while also distrusting it. The critic John Ruskin coined pathetic fallacy for the habit of projecting a narrator’s mood onto the landscape, so a storm becomes angry and a valley becomes calm. Used carelessly it is sentimental and, in a book about real animals, misleading. Used well it does something else: it records how a solitary person actually experiences company, because someone alone with an animal genuinely begins reading intention into behaviour. Modern naturalists handle this by describing what an animal does in precise physical terms and letting the reader supply the feeling. Notice how a good nature writer moves between the two registers, using exact observation when accuracy matters and warmth when the subject is the human’s own attachment.
Taking a wild animal is a legal act with a long history behind it. In the United States the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 made it an offence to take, possess or sell most native birds, their nests or even their feathers, and it grew out of a trade that had nearly wiped out several species for the millinery market. Birds of prey received further protection, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 added recovery duties for species at risk. The reasoning is that a wild animal is not property waiting to be claimed; it is part of a population, and removing individuals affects everyone. Modern permits therefore exist for falconry, research and rehabilitation, each requiring training and inspection. The rule that follows is the same one wildlife officers repeat every spring about apparently abandoned young animals: admiration is not a reason to take.
Think back over these chapters. A boy watches a falcon cut the sky like a thrown knife and thinks: I could raise one of those. So he does the un-thinkable — scaling a sheer cliff while the parent birds shriek and dive at his head, a fall waiting below — and comes down with one small, furious nestling, and names her for the terror it took to get her. Then, week by patient week, he teaches her to sit his fist, to fly, to hunt, to come home — and somewhere in the training a hunting tool becomes something more: a friend. And the boy who ran to the mountain to be gloriously alone discovers, in the fierce eyes of a bird, how much he needed someone to share it with.
Of all the creatures Sam might have chosen, the peregrine falcon is one of the most extraordinary on Earth. The peregrine is the fastest animal alive. When it hunts, it climbs high, then folds its wings and drops into a plunging dive called a ‘stoop,’ reaching speeds that can top 240 miles per hour — faster than a race car — before striking a bird in midair. Peregrines are found on every continent except Antarctica, and their vision is so keen that they can spot prey from more than a mile away. To share your life with such a bird is to keep company with a feathered marvel.
The art Sam teaches himself — training a bird of prey to hunt in partnership with a human — is called falconry, and it is astonishingly old, practiced for more than three thousand years. Falconry demands deep patience and knowledge, because a falconer does not truly own the bird. A trained falcon is always free to fly away and never return; it comes back to the falconer’s fist because of careful feeding, conditioning, and trust, not because it is forced. The partnership must be re-earned every single day. Jean Craighead George knew these birds intimately, and she drew Frightful with such accuracy that generations of readers have learned real falconry lore from the book. Through Sam and Frightful, George shows the wild not as a thing to be conquered but as a world to be joined, in a bond of mutual respect between a boy and a fierce bird.
This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!
Writing Task — Part 3 “A Companion”
Frightful becomes Sam’s partner and friend, answering the loneliness of his solitary life. Write about an animal companion or a close friend who has been important to you. How did the bond form, and what does that companionship give you? 6–10 sentences. End with why companionship matters, even to independent people.
No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.
Part 3 Complete!
You finished Chapters 7–9 of My Side of the Mountain.
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Your writing was checked automatically for length, spelling, grammar, and whether you included the key parts of the scene. Scroll back to Part 5 anytime to read your feedback and improve your work.
Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Jean Craighead George. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Jean Craighead George’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.