My Side of the Mountain

Sam:
Hey you guys, how 'bout some algae soup? [a raccoon eats the soup] Well, at least *somebody* likes it.

Sam:
The deer have pressed in all around me. They're hungry. They come into the hemlock grove to hide and sleep for the day. They manage the snow so well on their slender hooves. If I was to know that a million years from today, my children's children were to live as I am living in these mountains, I would marry me a wife with slender feet and begin immediately to breed a race with hooves. So that the mountain children of the future might run through the snows and meadows and mountains and marshes as easily as the deer. I must be pretty lonely to be having such daydreams. I guess I am.

Bando:
You know, you've done some amazing things here, Sam. Hollowed out a whole little world for yourself. I bet there's not another boy in the whole civilized world who's done anything like it.

Sam:
Yeah, but that's not why I came.

Miss Turner:
Why did you come, Sam?

Sam:
Well, I came because I thought the only way to know nature was to live with it. Like Thoreau. You know? And I came because of my experiments. I learned all about algae under the conditions of nature. And I learned about survival. And... I learned about myself.