Frightful's Mountain

Frightful’s Mountain by Jean Craighead George is a middle-grade novel that follows My Side of the Mountain and On the Far Side of the Mountain, a series about nature and survival. Frightful is a peregrine falcon that is raised by a young teenager named Sam Gribley and then released to the wild at the end of the previous novel. In this novel, she struggles to survive on her own in the wild while looking for Sam and her former mountain home. Frightful’s Mountain was published in 1999 and includes themes such as The Balance of Nature, The Beauty and Wonder of Nature, and The Capability of Young People. This guide refers to the 2001 print edition.

Plot Summary

Frightful’s Mountain picks up toward the end of On the Far Side of the Mountain when Frightful locates Sam Gribley and his sister, Alice, at the Helderberg Escarpment, north of the Catskill Mountains in New York. Frightful had been  taken from Sam by poachers named Bate and Skri a few days earlier, but Alice located her and set her free. Now, as Frightful finds Sam, the human who raised her, she waits for him to call her. Sam, however, does not do so, choosing instead to let her go free and hoping that she will be able to mate and produce offspring. Frightful is confused when Sam does not call her but is soon distracted by the call of a male falcon named Chup.

Frightful follows Chup to his nest above the Schoharie Valley, where Chup has three chicks, also called “eyases.” Although Frightful does not mother them instinctively right away, she learns with time and through Chup’s example to keep the eyases warm and allows one of them, Drum, to take food from her. Chup takes care of feeding the other two chicks, Duchess and Lady. The eyases are soon old enough to be left alone, and Frightful leaves the aerie and hunts with Mole, a dog, much as she did with Sam, with Mole fulfilling Sam’s role of kicking up game from the ground for Frightful to catch. As the eyases grow, they kick Frightful and Chup out of the nest, although both parents perch nearby to keep an eye on them. While Frightful continues to protect the eyases from danger, instinct tells her not feed them so that they will learn to fly. Motivated by hunger, each of them does. Although Frightful stays with Chup and the chicks, she continues to think of Sam and the one tree among millions on the mountain where she was raised.

As the days grow shorter, birds begin to fly south for the winter, but Frightful stays put, feeling a strong need to find Sam. She struggles to find food as the weather grows cold, although when she finds Mole living underneath a cabin formerly belonging to writer John Burroughs, she has some success hunting with his help. On one of her flights looking for food, Frightful finally locates Sam’s mountain. However, before she can get there, she is distracted by Duchess’s call and finds her adopted daughter leashed. Bate, the poacher who took Frightful from Sam months earlier, is nearby with his partner, Spud. When Bate and Spud see Frightful near Duchess, they attempt to catch her, knowing they can sell her illegally to an Arab falcon agent for a large sum of money. However, Frightful does not take the bait of their trap and leaves to find Sam.

On her way, Frightful alights on a utility pole on White Man Mountain. When her wings touch two wires simultaneously, she is electrocuted. A licensed falconer named Jon Wood sees her electrocution, picks her up, and places her in his pocket to take her home, thinking that she is dead. He knows the danger that utility poles pose to birds of prey and has written to the utility companies several times to ask them to modify the wires to prevent such tragedies. When Jon arrives home to tell his wife, Susan, about the incident, he is shocked to find that Frightful is alive and mostly unscathed, other than a few burned feathers. Jon and Susan have several birds of prey that they take to local schools to educate students about the birds and the dangers they face. They decide to keep Frightful for the winter, take her to their school visits as an example of the dangers of utility poles, and release her back into the wild when spring comes and she will have a better chance for survival. When schoolchildren see Frightful and learn about the utility poles, they send letters to the utility company and even bring some media attention on the issue as radio and television stations cover their efforts. Repairmen come to change the wires, but only on three utility poles. Jon and Susan enjoy their time with Frightful, teaching her to hunt rats and guessing that she may be a trained falcon. Susan gives Frightful the name “Destiny,” believing that Frightful has a special destiny ahead of her.

When Jon and Susan release Frightful in the spring, she finally locates Sam, who is overjoyed to see her. As Frightful’s spring instincts set in, she makes a scrape, or a nest, on the Delhi Bridge and is soon called to mate with a male falcon named 426. She lays three eggs on her scrape, and Sam is excited to find that she is incubating them. However, trouble comes when repairmen begin work on the Delhi Bridge per the governor’s order that every bridge in the state be repaired. The construction will cause noise and disruption that will make it difficult for Frightful to hatch and raise her young. The local conservation officer, Leon Longbridge, along with some of the children from Delhi, try to stop work on the bridge, but the workers are unable to go against orders or postpone the work. Leon and the children write letters to the governor of New York to explain the situation and hope he will be sympathetic to Frightful’s situation and see her value as an endangered species. Meanwhile, Sam carefully climbs the bridge each day without being seen and sits with Frightful to keep her calm and fed while she incubates the eggs. Her mate, 426, won’t come near the scrape when the work is noisy, so Sam takes over as provider when needed.

Leon Longbridge and Jon Wood, unaware of Sam’s efforts to keep Frightful content on the bridge, decide to try moving Frightful’s eggs to a new location, hoping that Frightful will follow. However, when she does not come to incubate the eggs, they must return them to the bridge. After 29 days, the eggs hatch, and Oksi, Screamer, and Blue Bill are born. A couple of days later, two men claiming to be from the US Fish and Wildlife Service come to relocate the eyases and take two of the three with them. When Leon Longbridge hears of this from the kids of Delhi, he knows that these men are imposters and suspects them to be Bate and Skri, the poachers. Sam soon realizes that Frightful still has Oksi, and he takes the baby falcon to his mountain where he thinks Frightful will follow. Sam creates a box for Oksi to live in, but Frightful does not come to her chick at first because she cannot locate her. Sam must feed Oksi without her imprinting on him; if Oksi identifies Sam as her mother, she may become tamed and unable to cope in the wild. Sam disguises himself as a chicken to feed Oksi, and eventually, Frightful returns to care for her offspring. When 426 fails to return to the aerie after hunting one day, Chup takes his place as a provider for Frightful and Oksi.

Sam teams up with Mole to try to find Frightful’s other two eyases and catch Bate and Skri. Following a hunch, Sam locates the men at John Burroughs’s lodge, and in a chaotic series of events, reaches Blue Bill and Screamer just as two police officers arrive and arrest the poachers. Since Blue Bill and Screamer are now registered in Albany, they must be raised by a falconer and then returned to the wild. Sam returns to his mountain, where Oksi is gradually gaining independence, although Frightful still provides protection from predators. Oksi soon learns to hunt and fly, and Blue Bill and Screamer do the same a few miles away with the help of falconer Perry Knowlton.

Once the chicks are independent, it is time for Frightful to migrate. This time, her instincts are strong, and she heads south, eventually ending up in the Galapagos Islands, where food is plentiful. When the time comes, her instincts tell her to return to the north. There she flies to Sam’s mountain and reunites with her mate, Chup. Frightful and Chup nest on the cupola of the Delhi courthouse, and Oksi returns to the home she remembers—Sam’s mountain.