Details of Billy's wilderness survival project give some needed heft to this version of the adjustment-to-a-new-stepparent theme. When he finds out that his mother is going to marry neighboring Mr. Wilson, Billy builds himself a lean-to in the woods and runs off with his dead father's rifle on the day of the wedding. But after four days, with the rain keeping him from hunting, his canned food supply dwindling, and friend Verny who's been supplying him with leftovers coming down sick, it takes only a couple of glimpses through his mother's window and a sympathetic encounter with his new stepsister to bring him home. A tame, carefully guided and too easily abandoned experiment, but the incidental realism (for example, his difficulties and eventual triumph in skinning, cooking and eating his first squirrel) make Billy accessible and sympathetic.