Wild Boars

The Wild Boars are a pair of watchful, suspicious investigators whose search for an imagined invader turns Elmer’s passage through Wild Island into a mounting danger. They build their case from scraps of evidence—tangerine peels, an uncertain report, and encounters with animals occupied by unfamiliar objects—and eventually lead the island’s pursuit of Elmer. Their mistake is not that they notice nothing, but that they interpret what they notice through a fixed expectation of invasion.

Watchers on Wild Island

The Wild Boars first emerge at night, speaking in low, solemn whispers while Elmer is moving through the island. In the dark he initially mistakes their shapes for boulders, a small misreading that parallels their own larger failure to understand what is happening around them. They are not merely passing animals in the background: their conversation establishes that they are monitoring unusual signs and trying to decide what those signs mean.

Their first inventory has three parts. Fresh tangerine peels have appeared beneath the wahoo bush near the Ocean Rocks; Mouse has reported an extraordinary rock some distance away, although the rock was gone when investigated; and more tangerine peels were found at that same spot. Because tangerines do not grow on Wild Island, one boar reasons that someone must have brought them across from another island. The vanished rock and the imported fruit become linked clues in a theory that remains uncertain even to its investigators.

The other boar resists that conclusion. The peels might have floated over by themselves, Mouse may not be reliable, and an invasion would surely have been noticed by him. The pair therefore have evidence and counterarguments, but no resolution. After a pause, they set the question aside and return to the jungle. Their retreat is temporary: the possibility they have entertained will soon organize how they read later encounters.

A case assembled from misreadings

The Wild Boars resume their investigation after hearing that tortoises believe they saw someone carrying a sick grandmother to a doctor. The report does not fit the facts as they understand them, since the supposed grandmother had died a week earlier. Rather than treating that contradiction as reason to abandon their suspicions, one boar takes it as proof that the sighting concerned something else. The discrepancy enlarges the mystery instead of correcting it.

The second boar declares an invasion to be under way and says that he intends to discover what it is. The pair divide the search: one is assigned to follow the trail toward Baby Dragon, while the other is to return through the big clearing. They also send Mouse to watch the Ocean Rocks, in case the suspected invader tries to leave before they locate it. Their plan is methodical, with separate routes and a lookout, but it rests on an unverified assumption. Elmer hides behind a mahogany tree as one boar passes, then lets the other get ahead rather than risk being seen near the clearing.

The boars’ investigation is repeatedly sharpened by events they do not understand. One later encounters the Rhinoceros with a toothbrush and toothpaste, and the animal is too busy brushing his tusk to answer questions. The boar sniffs angrily and continues down the trail toward Baby Dragon, treating this unexplained activity as another indication that the island’s ordinary order has been disturbed. Together with the earlier sighting of Seven Tigers occupied with chewing gum, the Rhinoceros’s grooming gives the investigators a pattern—but the pattern records Elmer’s diversions, not hostile preparations.

From suspicion to pursuit

By the time Elmer is crossing the river on a bridge made from Crocodiles, the Wild Boars’ suspicions have become a collective alarm. The two lead a large, angry crowd toward the bank: Seven Tigers, a Rhinoceros, two Lions, a Gorilla, and countless screeching monkeys follow. The cry that the intruder is a trick and must be stopped makes plain how the rescue appears from their side. Elmer is trying to reach Baby Dragon, but the animals interpret his crossing as an attack directed at the dragon.

One boar spots Elmer’s route and calls attention to the Crocodiles forming a bridge. As Elmer leaps onto the opposite bank, the boar jumps onto the first Crocodile, carrying the pursuit onto the same improvised crossing. This is a decisive change from whispered debate: the pair are no longer weighing whether an invasion exists, but helping lead an immediate chase. Their earlier decision to search the trail toward Baby Dragon now converges with the larger group’s rush to the river.

The boars and the rescue

The Wild Boars’ role turns on a sharp difference between intention and effect. They believe they are protecting their island and its dragon from an invader; the reader knows that Elmer has come to free Baby Dragon from captivity and forced labor. The dragon is tied by a rope to a system controlled from the riverbank, and a sign directs people to summon him by turning a crank and to report disorderly conduct to the Gorilla. The boars’ pursuit therefore helps preserve a coercive arrangement, even though the evidence does not establish that either boar designed or personally administered it.

Their suspicion is comic in its accumulation of clues, but consequential in its timing. The tangerine peels, the vanished rock, Mouse’s report, the mistaken account of the grandmother, and the odd distractions of gum and toothpaste all become parts of one increasingly confident story. When the boars identify the crocodile bridge, they put Elmer’s rescue in immediate danger just as he is cutting through Baby Dragon’s rope with a jackknife. Their function in the episode is not simply to misunderstand him: by converting a mistaken interpretation into coordinated pursuit, they make the last stage of his escape urgent.