Elmer’s Journey to Wild Island to Rescue the Dragon turns a conversation about flight into a dangerous expedition to release Baby Dragon from forced labor. Old Alley Cat’s account gives Elmer both a destination and a reason to go: the dragon is captive, overworked, and bound to a rope that makes him serve as a ferry across Wild Island’s river. What follows is not a direct voyage but a chain of improvised passages—by ship, inside a grain sack, along a beach, and over ocean rocks—before Elmer reaches the river and attempts the rescue.

The rescue call and its stakes

Old Alley Cat explains that Baby Dragon had fallen from a low-flying cloud onto the riverbank about four months before the cat reached Wild Island. Too young to fly well and unable to take off again because one wing was badly bruised, he was found by the animals, who saw him as a solution to their long-standing difficulty crossing the island’s wide, muddy river. They tied a large rope around his neck and waited for his wing to heal. Once it had, they trained him to carry passengers and loads across the water.

The arrangement is presented as exploitation, not a partnership. Baby Dragon is made to work all day and sometimes all night, carries loads that are too heavy, and is beaten and has his wings twisted when he complains. A stake and a rope that reaches only across the river keep him in place. Old Alley Cat describes the rope as exceptionally tough and knotted so densely that untying it would take days. The crocodiles are his only occasional company: they greet him about once a week, if they remember. The cat had secretly talked with him in the bushes, become his friend, and promised to try to help, though she had not known how she could do so.

Elmer’s interest in airplanes prompts Old Alley Cat to propose the rescue. If he could free Baby Dragon and treat him kindly, she reasons, the dragon might let him ride on his back. Elmer agrees eagerly. He is also angry because his mother has been rude to Old Alley Cat, and that anger makes the prospect of running away for a while less painful. The cat can advise him but is too old to make the journey herself, so the expedition begins as a plan made by two friends and undertaken by one.

Secrecy, supplies, and departure

That afternoon, Elmer and Old Alley Cat go to the docks and learn that a ship for the Island of Tangerina will sail the following week. They begin planning around what the cat knows about Wild Island. To keep the preparations secret, they hide every found or purchased item behind a rock in the park. The night before departure, Elmer borrows his father’s knapsack and packs with the cat.

The provisions and tools anticipate a journey that will require more than simple endurance. Elmer takes chewing gum, two dozen pink lollipops, rubber bands, black rubber boots, a compass, a toothbrush and toothpaste, six magnifying glasses, a sharp jackknife, a comb and hairbrush, seven colored hair ribbons, clean clothes, and an empty grain bag labeled Cranberry. For the ship passage he also packs twenty-five peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and six apples, the only apples he can find in the pantry. The assortment is conspicuously practical and eccentric at once: food for the voyage sits beside small objects that will later make ingenuity more useful than force.

At the ship, a night watchman threatens to expose the plan. Old Alley Cat distracts him with loud, strange noises while Elmer runs up the gangplank and hides among sacks of wheat in the hold. The ship sails early the next morning. The departure is therefore not an authorized passage but the first of several disguises and evasions that carry Elmer toward his destination.

The disguised passage to Cranberry

Elmer remains hidden in the hold for six days and nights, twice nearly being caught when the ship stops to take on cargo. When he hears that the next port is Cranberry and that the wheat will be unloaded there, he realizes the sailors may send him home if they find him. He takes the empty, Cranberry-labeled grain sack from his knapsack, climbs inside with the knapsack, folds the top inward, and secures it with a rubber band.

The disguise is far from convincing. One sailor calls the lumpy sack the queerest bag of wheat he has seen, but its label says Cranberry. Another feels the sack, catches Elmer’s elbow, and mistakes what he has touched for dried corn on the cob. Instead of discovering the stowaway, he has Elmer tipped into the unloading net with the wheat. The mistake carries Elmer ashore: the ship’s written record lists 160 bags of wheat and one bag of dried corn on the cob, while the merchant does not count the delivery until the next morning. After dark, Elmer climbs out, folds the sack back into his knapsack, and walks along the shore to sleep on the sand.

From Tangerina across the sea

Hunger greets Elmer when he wakes. A tangerine falls from the tree beneath which he has slept, reminding him that he is on the Island of Tangerina, where tangerine trees grow wild. He gathers thirty-one fruit, as many as he can carry, and sets off along the shore in search of the rocks connecting the islands. When he asks a fisherman about Wild Island, the man is so frightened by the question that he cannot speak for a while. He eventually warns that many people have tried to explore the island and none have returned alive; people believe the wild animals ate them. Elmer continues instead of turning back. The next day, after seeing a distant line of rocks leading toward a tiny green patch, he eats seven tangerines and heads down the beach.

The crossing is made in darkness. Some rocks rise high above the water; others are nearly covered by waves, and their surfaces are slippery. Where the gaps are wide, Elmer has to run and leap. A growing rumble turns out not to be the island but a sleeping whale nestled between two rocks. Elmer lands on its back by mistake, while its snoring masks his startled apology. He continues climbing, slipping, and jumping from rock to rock for seven hours, and reaches Wild Island’s last rock while it is still dark. The landing marks the end of the sea passage, not the end of the danger: the island itself is the place where the animals hold Baby Dragon.

The river crossing and the rescue attempt

Among the island’s hazards is a rhinoceros who guards a private weeping pool and threatens to drown anyone found using it. The rhinoceros tosses Elmer above the water while he hangs by the seat of his pants from its tusk. Its grievance is unexpectedly specific: it weeps most over the change of its tusk, once pearly white and now yellow-gray with age. The encounter gives the journey’s peril a comic, particular shape without making it harmless; Elmer is in immediate danger even as the animal’s distress centers on its appearance.

At the river, Elmer finds a high flagpole with a rope running across to the far bank and down around a crank. A sign instructs users to yank the crank to summon the dragon and report disorderly conduct to the gorilla. Knowing from Old Alley Cat that the rope is tied around Baby Dragon’s neck, Elmer understands the crossing mechanism as an instrument of control. If the dragon is on his side, the gorilla can twist his wings until he flies across; if he is on the opposite bank, the gorilla can crank the rope until he risks choking or is forced back. Calling to Baby Dragon would alert the gorilla, while climbing the pole and crossing hand over hand would expose Elmer to the muddy river and whatever might live in it. He is still considering that dangerous route when a crocodile calls from the water and invites him in, saying it has a craving for something sweet.

The rescue reaches its decisive point when Baby Dragon realizes Elmer has come for him. He runs out of the bushes, calls for Elmer, and warns that a boar is coming across on the crocodiles after him. Elmer reaches the dragon with his sharp jackknife and begins sawing at the thick rope, urging him to stand still. The pursuit is closing: both boars, all seven tigers, two lions, the rhinoceros, the gorilla, and countless monkeys are on their way across. At this point the journey has brought Elmer face to face with the captivity Old Alley Cat described; the knife has begun the work the rope’s knots would have made impossible to undo by hand, but the animals are arriving before the cutting is finished.

Narrative significance

The expedition’s progress depends on treating apparent obstacles as problems to be solved rather than reasons to retreat. A sack, a mistaken cargo label, fruit gathered from a tree, and a seven-hour passage over rocks all become means of moving forward. The comic misidentification of Elmer as dried corn contrasts with the serious danger behind his destination: Baby Dragon has been reduced to equipment for an inconvenient river crossing.

The journey also shifts the meaning of the dragon’s flight. The animals value his ability to cross the river, but the rope turns that ability into compulsory labor and gives the gorilla a way to punish or summon him. Elmer’s rescue effort begins from a different premise: that Baby Dragon’s cooperation depends on kindness, not ownership or force. By ending at the rope with the pursuers drawing near, the expedition makes that difference concrete. Elmer has crossed the sea and reached his friend, but freeing him requires action under the very system of coercion the journey set out to undo.