43 pages • 1 hour read
On the Far Side of the Mountain
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Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “A Trade Comes My Way”
Sam spends three nights at the Spillkill stream grieving for Frightful and practicing with his sling, which proves to be quite difficult to use accurately. When Sam returns to his home, his friend Bando comes to visit, announcing himself with his usual greeting, “Hall-oo, the tree! Hall-oo, the house!” (33). Bando is an English professor who visited Sam often during his first year on the mountain and loved the area so much that he bought a cabin two miles from Sam’s camp and moved there with his new bride, Zella, who is a lawyer. Zella does not love the rustic cabin life as much as Bando, but she tolerates it. Bando’s arrival makes Sam realize that he hasn’t seen Alice since he returned, and he wonders where she might be.
Bando wants to borrow Sam’s water mill to create supplies and replace his Adirondack furniture, since he recently sold several pieces to a man who offered to buy them at such a high price that Bando could not refuse. Sam starts up the water mill and reflects on a request Alice made last fall that they use the mill to generate electricity. Despite her efforts to learn about electricity in her correspondence school science class, Sam refused to implement such a system, as he was uninterested in electricity and the noise it would inevitably bring. Bando’s voice brings Sam out of his reverie, and Sam confesses that the conservation officer confiscated Frightful three days ago. Bando expresses his sympathy and listens as Sam shares the details of the officer’s visit.
Chapter 5 Summary: “I Go Backwards in Order to Go Forwards”
Bando leaves and Sam rereads his journal entries from July of the previous year, when he started building the mill. He needed a dam first, but the one he made washed out during a three-day storm. Sam and Alice observed beavers to learn how to make a dam that would last, and the completion of their dam created a pond that Sam stocked with fish. Next, they built the millhouse out of sandstone and shale. With help from Miss Turner, the town librarian and Sam’s friend, Sam gained the knowledge to build the millhouse without mortar, and by September, the millhouse was complete thanks to help from Miss Turner, Mrs. Strawberry (a nearby farm owner), Bando, Zella, and Alice. Next came the sluice, which Sam made by hollowing out a tree that Mrs. Strawberry helped him to fell in the precise location needed. Bando and Sam then constructed a wooden waterwheel, and although miscellaneous projects and winter preparations delayed its installation, all of Sam’s friends finally came in November to help put the waterwheel in place. After celebrating Thanksgiving with Bando, Zella, Miss Turner, Mrs. Strawberry, and Alice, Sam made cogwheels and attached his dad’s saw to make the mill useful. Everyone gathered once more for the sawmill’s opening and had a feast to celebrate their accomplishment. A month later, Sam added another cog to the mill to make a forge for shaping scraps of iron into tools.
Chapter 6 Summary: “I Am in for a Surprise”
Sam hears a noise in the root cellar, and, thinking it must be Alice, goes to talk to her. However, the noise was made by her pet raccoon, Jessie Coon James. Sam notices that the raccoon is quite hungry, which is unusual because Alice feeds her regularly. After heading to Alice’s treehouse, he realizes that Alice is not there, and he finds a note saying she has left. Sam is surprised and torn between being upset with Alice and understanding her desire to have an adventure.
Bando gives Sam a pamphlet from Zella featuring instructions on how to use a water mill to make electricity and explains that Zella would love to have electricity too. Sam is annoyed that Alice is still pushing for electricity even in her absence, and as Bando resumes working with the mill, Sam makes dinner by cooking squash in the oven he made from shale and barbecuing a squirrel on a grill built into the ground. Sam decides that Alice has a right to privacy and doesn’t tell Bando that she left. Once Bando goes home, Sam finds he has no appetite for his dinner and instead investigates Alice’s wigwam to see how much she took with her, hoping to get an idea of how long she plans to be gone. He finds that she took maps, clothing for rough terrain, a backpack, water carrier, and gloves, indicating that she plans to be gone for more than a few days. Sam goes to sleep that night curious about where Alice could have gone.
Chapter 7 Summary: “I Am Sent East by Northeast”
In the morning, Sam goes to Mrs. Strawberry’s farmhouse to see if she knows anything about Alice. Mrs. Strawberry’s horse, Slats, greets him at the gate, and Sam uses the horse language Mrs. Strawberry taught him to tell Slats that he is annoying. Mrs. Strawberry tells Sam that Alice recently started a new project and hasn’t been around to ride Slats for the last three days, allowing Sam to calculate that Alice could be 60 miles away by now in any direction. Mrs. Strawberry also saw Alice leading her pig Crystal on a leash, and Sam knows that the pig will be easy to track. He thinks of a game that he and Alice like to play called “On the Track,” in which one person leaves subtle clues and the other tracks their route. Sam sets off after Alice and finds her makeshift compass that uses sticks and stones to gauge the shadows cast by the sun. He interprets the compass and learns that Alice is headed south for a short distance with the long-term goal of heading east by northeast.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
Despite Sam and Alice’s isolated lifestyle, George introduces an extensive and tight-knit community of neighbors to emphasize that they are not alone in their survivalist endeavors. George emphasizes the community of friends they have found and introduces the theme The Importance of Friendship and Community by firmly establishing Sam’s close friendship with Bando, who was especially helpful during Sam’s first year on the mountain. Bando and Sam understand one another well and share a similar love for the mountain. The building of the water mill provides a beautiful picture of the way Sam’s friends come together to help him, for so many of them contributed considerable time and effort into making this endeavor a reality. For example, Miss Turner, the librarian in town, supervised the construction of the wall using knowledge from a book on primitive masonry, and Mrs. Strawberry, who owns a nearby farm, came to break stones into usable blocks for the walls and helped Sam to fell a tree exactly where he wanted it. Similarly, Bando and Zella’s efforts to pitch in round out the close sense of community that binds these otherwise introverted people together, and everyone felt “great pride and satisfaction” (49) on the day the waterwheel started to turn; the mill is a project they all contributed to, and George shows the collective joy of people who work together, also being sure to highlight the many capable women who play vital roles in the building of the mill.
By using Sam’s journal entries to highlight past events, George portrays the siblings’ willingness to learn and solve problems. For example, when the dam for the water mill was destroyed by a storm, Sam and Alice observed beavers building a dam and learned how to make their dam stronger. In this way, George shows that observing nature is a means of learning, and that humility and perseverance are required for problem-solving. George also highlights the young siblings’ logic and inventiveness, illustrated by Sam’s use of several disparate clues to deduce Alice’s travel plans and Alice’s ingenuity in making a compass with nothing more than sticks and rocks.
The frequent appearance of Sam’s journal entries serves several key purposes within the larger structure of the novel. Most importantly, the entries show snapshots of the past year and help readers to bridge the narrative gap between the end of My Side of the Mountain and the beginning of On the Far Side of the Mountain. Within the context of the story, rereading the journal is also Sam’s way of processing his feelings and keeping his mind off Frightful. Taken together with the detailed illustrations of mundane survival items such as the mill, the forge, Alice’s compass, and Sam’s cooking station, the journal also provides a variety of helpful visuals for readers to better understand how different items work and to gain an in-depth appreciation for the intricacies of the siblings’ way of life.
The role of animals in Sam and Alice’s life on the mountain also features strongly throughout the narrative, for both Sam and Alice care deeply for animals and center their lives around observing animal behavior and even adopting certain animals as companions. For example, Alice takes good care of her raccoon, Jessie Coon James, and provides the local birds with food after a big storm. Similarly, Sam checks on another local resident, the Baron Weasel, and both siblings ensure that the animals they share their home with are doing well despite the harsh weather. Sam also shows his sensitivity to the natural world by communicating with each animal in its own natural “language,” learning how to read Frightful’s feathers and the messages they send, and using sounds that Mrs. Strawberry’s horse, Slats, will understand. Sam and Alice both treat animals with care and respect and do their best to take care of them without detracting from the animals’ natural way of life.
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By Jean Craighead George
