Protecting Wildlife

Protecting Wildlife gives Kensuke Ogawa’s island life its defining responsibility. He does not treat the orangutans and gibbons as resources or scenery: he learns from their behavior, lives alongside them, and acts to shelter them when hunters return. His care is practical and sometimes restrictive, but it grows into a bond with Michael, who joins him in protecting animals whose safety depends on the island remaining undisturbed.

Learning the Island’s Animals

Kensuke’s knowledge of the forest is grounded in attention to its inhabitants. He knows where fruit grows and when it is ripe, climbs trees with agility, and gathers honey from a hollow without being deterred by the bees. The orangutans travel with him along the tracks, sometimes patrolling ahead and sometimes following behind. His singing brings them to him; they seem absorbed by his voice, and he has built a relationship of trust with them over time.

That trust has a history. Kensuke explains that, while living alone, he learned what was safe to eat by watching the orangutans and learned to climb as they did. He also learned to read their signals, including darting eyes and nervous scratching, and to heed their warnings. His survival knowledge thus comes not only from solitary skill but from careful observation of animals and gradual participation in their world. The orangutans are companions with their own responses and habits, not merely a supply of food or a means to his survival.

Michael and Stella initially remain at a distance from the orangutans, and the animals are wary of them too. Later, one young orangutan climbs onto Michael’s lap, examines his face, and is followed by others who treat him like a climbing frame. The older animals remain more cautious, while Stella and the orangutans continue to keep their distance from one another. This gradual contact marks a change in the island’s human-animal relations: Michael is no longer only an outsider to Kensuke’s territory, but someone the orangutans begin to tolerate and approach.

Protection and Human Boundaries

Kensuke’s concern for wildlife helps explain the rules he imposes on Michael. When Michael makes a fire, Kensuke draws a map in the sand, marks a boundary dividing the island, and assigns each of them to a different side. He repeatedly orders Michael not to make fire and renews the boundary as needed. The restriction is an exercise of control, but it is also connected to Kensuke’s fear that people will find the island and harm its animals. He has already come to believe that humans bring danger to the orangutans and gibbons.

The same protective impulse appears when Kensuke prevents Michael from swimming after a storm. He insists that the sea is dangerous, forcibly leads Michael back to the beach, and makes clear that the prohibition is a command rather than advice. Michael resents the accumulated restrictions, yet depends on Kensuke for food and water and complies. Later, Kensuke recounts that the sea was full of jellyfish and that he knew they were dangerous; when Michael was stung, Kensuke brought him into the cave and treated him with vinegar made from berries. In this episode, care takes the form of a rule Michael experiences as confinement, but the danger Kensuke fears proves real.

Kensuke’s caution is not simply a general distrust of the natural world. He has learned to live within its dangers and to read animal behavior; what he fears most is human intrusion. After the war, he says, no other people came to the island for many years. Later, armed hunters arrived. Kensuke hid the orangutans in his cave, calling them to him with his song, but the men shot gibbons, killed mothers, and took their babies. The violence transforms his view of people: he comes to believe that all people are killers and resolves to avoid them. His attempt to keep Michael at a distance and prevent a fire is therefore bound to the memory of animals endangered by human discovery.

The Hunters’ Return

When Kensuke recognizes a boat he believes belongs to the hunters, he does not treat it as a possible rescue. He identifies the danger to the orangutans and tells Michael that the men have returned to kill gibbons and steal the young. Their immediate task is to gather the orangutans and bring them into the cave, where they will be safer. Kensuke sings as he moves through the forest, and the animals emerge in small groups. They find fifteen, then search for the four still missing; three more arrive, including Tomodachi, while Kikanbo remains unaccounted for.

The delay heightens the risk. Michael carries two younger orangutans, one in each arm, while watching and calling for Kikanbo. The outboard motor stops, and the men’s voices and laughter carry from the shore. As Michael reaches the cave, gunshots begin. The humans and animals shelter together at its back, while Kensuke sings softly to calm the orangutans. The animals huddle close; Tomodachi is especially agitated, and Stella growls at Michael’s feet. When the hunting party moves away, Kensuke still makes Michael wait until they hear the motor start and the boat leave before coming out.

The search for Kikanbo continues after the immediate danger has passed. Kensuke and Michael call and sing, but at first find no sign of him. Kensuke is inconsolable when they discover the bodies of two dead gibbons, both mothers. They bury them at the forest’s edge without words. Then, on their sorrowful walk back along the beach, Kikanbo charges out of the trees, climbs Kensuke, and wraps himself around his neck. His return brings relief, but it does not undo the deaths or the hunters’ intrusion. That night, Kensuke and Michael sing “Ten Green Bottles” over their fish soup, making the song both a mourning for the gibbons and a celebration that Kikanbo is safe.

Shelter and Continuing Responsibility

The raid changes the practical arrangements of island life. In the following weeks, Kensuke makes a stout bamboo cage at the back of the cave so the orangutans can be kept more securely if the hunters return. He repeatedly thinks about what might have happened to Kikanbo and wishes he had prepared sooner. He also wishes the gibbons would come when he sang, so that he could protect them too. Together, he and Michael cut branches and brush and stack them outside the cave mouth, ready to conceal the entrance. Kensuke sends Michael to the hilltop with binoculars to watch for the boat; even after the immediate threat recedes, he remains wary.

His concern for animals is also evident in a quieter, recurring act: the annual protection of newly hatched sea turtles. Kensuke explains that the mother turtles lay eggs on the beach and that the young emerge at night when the moon is high. Many do not reach the sea, and birds may take them, so he stays to drive the birds away. He describes the hatchlings’ return years later to lay eggs as part of the same continuing cycle. Michael and Kensuke spend the night helping them: they turn stranded hatchlings over, carry the weakest down to the water, and patrol the beach. At dawn, Stella joins them in chasing birds, though a few turtles are still taken. Their care matters without making them masters of the outcome; the animals’ journey remains hazardous, and the humans can only improve the chances of survival.

Kensuke ultimately makes protection of the island’s animal community a reason to remain there. When the Peggy Sue returns for Michael, Kensuke explains that he will not go back to Japan: the orangutans are his family, the hunters may come again, and someone must look after them. He frames his decision through the image of an emperor who must stay in his kingdom and care for his people. The claim is not that the island belongs to him without qualification, but that his life has become bound to the beings who depend on his protection. His care initially appears to Michael as a set of prohibitions; by the end, it is also a chosen obligation that shapes Kensuke’s decision to stay behind.