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interessante Bücher in Englisch zu lesen


My Side of the Mountain

von Jean Craighead George

ISBN 0140348107

4,99 US$

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Hier der Klappentext :

"An extraordinary book ... it will be
read year after year."
-The Horn Book

Sam Gribley is tired of living in a crowded New York City
apartment, so he runs away to the Catskill Mountain wil-
derness to forge a life of his own. No one takes his plans
seriously-except Sam himself. With only a penknife, a
ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he must
rely on his own ingenuity and on the resources of the land
to survive. And survive he does. Alone in the mountains,
Sam learns about courage, danger, and the true meaning of
companionship, and captures it all in his journal. My Side
of the Mountain is the vivid and engrossing account of the
year that changes Sam's life.



Hier eine Leseprobe :

I Meet One of My Own Kind and
Have a Terrible Time Getting Away

Five notches into June, my house was done. I could
stand in it, lie down in it, and there was room left over
for a stump to sit on. On warm evenings I would lie on
my stomach and look out the door, listen to the frogs
and nighthawks, and hope it would storm so that I
could crawl into my tree and be dry. I had gotten
soaked during a couple of May downpours, and now
that my house was done, I wanted the chance to sit in
my hemlock and watch a cloudburst wet everything but
me. This opportunity didn't come for a long time. It
was dry.

One morning I was at the edge of the meadow. I had
cut down a small ash tree and was chopping it into
lengths of about eighteen inches each. This was the
beginning of my bed that I was planning to work on
after supper every night.

With the golden summer upon me, food was much
easier to get, and I actually had several hours of free
time after supper in which to do other things. I had been
eating frogs' legs, turtles, and best of all, an occasional
rabbit. My snares and traps were set now. Furthermore,
I had a good supply of cattail roots I had dug in the
marsh.

If you ever eat cattails, be sure to cook them well,
otherwise the fibers are tough and they take more chew-
ing to get the starchy food from them than they are
worth. However, they taste just like potatoes after
you've been eating them a couple of weeks, and to my
way of thinking are extremely good.

Well, anyway, that summer morning when I was
gathering material for a bed, I was singing and chop-
ping and playing a game with a raccoon I had come to
know. He had just crawled in a hollow tree and had
gone to bed for the day when I came to the meadow.
From time to time I would tap on his tree with my ax.
He would hang his sleepy head out, snarl at me, close
his eyes, and slide out of sight.

The third time I did this, I knew something was
happening in the forest. Instead of closing his eyes, he
pricked up his ears and his face became drawn and
tense. His eyes were focused on something down the
mountain. I stood up and looked. I could see nothing.

I squatted down and went back to work. The raccoon
dove out of sight.

"Now what's got you all excited?" I said, and tried
once more to see what he had seen.

I finished the posts for the bed and was looking
around for a bigger ash to fell and make slats for the
springs when I nearly jumped out of my shoes.

"Now what are you doing up here all alone?" It was
a human voice. I swung around and stood face to face
with a little old lady in a pale blue sunbonnet and a loose
brown dress.

"Oh! Gosh!" I said. "Don't scare me like that. Say
one word at a time until I get used to a human voice."
I must have looked frightened because she chuckled,
smoothed down the front of her dress, and whispered,
"Are you lost?"

"Oh, no, ma'am," I stuttered.

"Then a little fellow like you should not be all alone
way up here on this haunted mountain."
"Haunted?" said I.

"Yes, indeed. There's an old story says there are little
men up here who play ninepins right down in that gorge
in the twilight." She peered at me. "Are you one of
them?"

"Oh, no, no, no, no," I said. "I read that story. It's
just make-believe." I laughed, and she puckered her
forehead.

"Well, come on," she said, "make some use of
yourself and help me fill this basket with strawber-
ries."

I hesitated-she meant my strawberry supply.
"Now, get on with you. A boy your age should be
doing something worthwhile, 'stead of playing mumbly

peg with sticks. Come on, young man." She jogged me
out into the meadow.

We worked quite a while before we said any more.
Frankly, I was wondering how to save my precious,
precious strawberries, and I may say I picked slowly.
Every time I dropped one in her basket, I thought how
good it would taste.

"Where do ye live?" I jumped. It is terribly odd to
hear a voice after weeks of listening only to birds and
raccoons, and what is more, to hear the voice ask a
question like that.

"I live here," I said.

"Ye mean Delhi. Fine. You can walk me home."
Nothing I added did any good. She would not be
shaken from her belief that I lived in Delhi. So I let it
go.

We must have reaped every last strawberry before she
stood up, put her arm in mine and escorted me down
the mountain. I certainly was not escorting her. Her
wiry little arms were like crayfish pinchers. I couldn't
have gotten away if I had tried. So I walked and lis-
tened.

She told me all the local and world news, and it was
rather pleasant to hear about the National League, an
atom bomb test, and a Mr. Riley's three-legged dog that
chased her chickens. In the middle of all this chatter she
said, "That's the best strawberry patch in the entire
Catskill range. I come up here every spring. For forty
years I've come to that meadow for my strawberries. ....

Hier noch zwei aktuellere Ausgaben die es bei Amazon.de zu kaufen gibt.

My Side of the mountain Taschenbuch - 192 Seiten - Puffin Books 6,47 €





My Side of the mountain Taschenbuch - 192 Seiten - Puffin Books 6,47 €