Part 6
Winter is coming, and Sam knows it will be the true test of everything he has learned. He prepares with the seriousness of a life depending on it. He obtains deer — taking them from hunters who leave them — and wastes nothing: he tans the hides into leather and sews himself a warm deerskin suit, boots, and mittens; he preserves meat to last the frozen months; he renders the fat into tallow for candles and grease; he carves tools and needles from the bones. His hollow tree, banked against the cold, becomes a snug den. Then the real winter arrives — blinding snow, howling ice storms, cold that could kill an unprepared person in hours. But Sam, warm in his deerskins and his tree, well-fed from his stores, with Frightful for company, does not merely survive the winter; he masters it. Still, the deep of winter is hard. The world shrinks to white silence, the days are short and dark, and for long stretches Sam feels the loneliness press in. He misses Bando, misses people, misses the sun. He learns that survival is not only about food and warmth but about keeping one’s spirit alive through the long, dark, solitary months — and that even a master of the wild can grow weary of being alone.
| Section | What you will practice |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Winter words: preserve, tan, insulate, endure, provisions… |
| Literary Elements | The great test, mastery earned, and loneliness in the dark |
| Cross-Curricular | Surviving winter — how people and animals endure the cold |
| Ch. | What happens |
|---|---|
| Chapters 16–17 | Ready for Winter — Sam prepares fiercely: deerskin clothes and boots, preserved meat, tallow candles, bone tools; he turns his tree into a snug winter den. |
| Chapter 18 | The Long Dark — a harsh winter of snow and ice comes; warm and well-fed, Sam masters it — yet the deep of winter brings loneliness and a longing for people and sun. |
Preserving food means denying microbes what they need. Drying removes the water bacteria and moulds require, and it is the oldest method, which is why dried fish, fruit and thin strips of meat appear in almost every traditional cuisine. Smoking adds antimicrobial compounds and a drying heat at once. Salting and sugaring work by osmosis, drawing water out of any cell that touches them, including microbial ones. Cold slows everything down, so a stream-cooled hollow or a pit dug below the frost line acts as a natural larder, and a root cellar keeps vegetables for months at a steady low temperature. Fermentation is the clever exception: it lets one harmless organism take over so that harmful ones cannot. Anyone facing a northern winter has to think in these terms by late summer, because the season of gathering ends long before the season of eating.
ⓘ 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.
Winter in the northeastern United States is shaped by cold continental air meeting moisture from the Atlantic. When a low-pressure system tracks up the coast it can pull enormous amounts of water vapour over that cold air and produce the heavy snowfalls called nor’easters, named for the winds that arrive with them. Snow itself is a mixed blessing on the ground: it makes travel exhausting, and it also insulates, trapping enough still air that the space beneath a deep drift stays far warmer than the exposed air above. Small animals exploit this, living out the winter in the gap between snow and soil, a zone biologists call the subnivean layer. Cold snaps are most severe on clear, calm nights, when heat escapes upward with nothing to hold it, which is why the coldest hours arrive just before dawn.
- He turns his tree into a snug winter den.
- Warm and fed, Sam masters it — but feels the loneliness.
- He makes deerskin clothes and preserves meat.
- Sam prepares hard for winter.
- A harsh winter of snow and ice arrives.
Long narratives usually contain a stretch designed to be bleak. Structurally it exists to test whether the protagonist’s new competence holds when conditions are worst, and readers accept it because a skill demonstrated only in good weather proves nothing. Writers manage the risk of losing the reader by keeping the low point short relative to the rest, by giving the character small concrete tasks that keep the prose moving, and by placing one detail of beauty or comfort inside it. That single contrasting detail is what separates hardship writing from misery. Notice also the tense and pace: passages of endurance are often written in shorter sentences and plainer vocabulary, because a narrator who is cold and tired does not reach for elaborate description. The prose itself is being asked to sound depleted.
Surviving winter is a physiological problem before it is a practical one. A body maintains its core temperature by burning fuel, so calorie needs rise sharply in the cold, and someone both underfed and exposed loses ground on two fronts at once. Frostbite arrives first at the extremities, because the body sacrifices fingers, toes, ears and nose to protect the core, and the danger is that freezing tissue stops hurting. Damp is the multiplier: wet clothing conducts heat away many times faster than dry, which is why wilderness medicine treats staying dry as a higher priority than staying warm. Diet matters too, since a winter of lean meat alone causes illness without the fat that supplies energy and certain vitamins. All of it argues for the same discipline — do the hard preparation in autumn, because winter removes the strength required to improvise.
Think back over these chapters. A boy who once could not make a fire now moves through his tasks like an old woodsman: scraping hides soft, stitching a suit of deerskin, smoking meat, melting fat into candles, carving needles from bone, banking his tree against the coming cold. And when the great winter falls — snow to the branches, ice storms screaming through the trees, a cold that kills — he is ready, warm, and fed, and we finally understand the snug scene the book opened with. But mastery is not the same as joy. In the long white silence, the short dark days, the boy who wanted so badly to be alone feels the aloneness settle on him like the snow, and misses, with a real ache, the sound of another human voice.
Sam’s fierce winter preparations reflect one of nature’s greatest tests: surviving the cold. For a warm-bodied creature, the central problem of winter is heat. The body must keep making and holding warmth faster than the freezing air can steal it away, or the creature dies of the cold. Every animal that lives where winters are hard has to solve this problem somehow, and life has evolved three broad strategies to do it.
The first is to MIGRATE — to flee the cold entirely, as many birds do, traveling thousands of miles to warmer lands. The second is to HIBERNATE — to drop the body’s temperature and heartbeat and sleep through the worst months, as bears do, living off fat stored during the plentiful seasons. The third is to RESIST — to stay awake and active through the winter by growing a thick coat of fur or feathers, storing food ahead of time, and sheltering in an insulated den. Sam, who can neither migrate nor hibernate, does exactly what a resisting animal does: he grows a ‘thick coat’ by sewing warm deerskin clothes, stores ‘fat’ as preserved meat, and insulates his ‘den’ — his hollow tree — against the killing cold. By skill and planning, he applies the same survival logic that evolution wrote into the animals around him — but Jean Craighead George adds a truth the biology leaves out. Enduring a hard winter is also a test of the spirit: the long dark, the short days, and the deep silence weigh on the heart, and staying warm and fed is only half the battle.
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 6 “The Long Dark”
Sam masters winter’s cold but struggles with its loneliness and darkness. Write about getting through a long, hard stretch — a tough season, a difficult time — when you had to keep your spirit up, not just get by. What was hard, and what kept you going? 6–10 sentences. End with what helped your spirit survive.
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 6 Complete!
You finished Chapters 16–18 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.