Matt’s and Borka’s bands fight after a raid, injuring Bump

Matt’s and Borka’s bands fight after a raid, injuring Bump, a turning point in which a robbery’s spoils give way to retaliation and the feud’s human cost. The attack on travelers and Bumper’s wound expose the violence beneath the robbers’ rivalry, while Ronia’s distress makes clear that the conflict threatens not only her father’s enemies but everyone she loves.

The Raid on Robbers’ Walk

Noddle-Pete recounts how Matt and his men lay in ambush on Robbers’ Walk. A large group of travelers arrived, including merchants carrying provisions, skins, and money. Unable to defend themselves, they lost everything. Noddle-Pete describes their anger and says they hurried away, apparently intending to complain to the sheriff. His amused account contrasts with Ronia’s unease: she asks whether the travelers were angry, but cannot share his pleasure in their helplessness.

The danger escalates as Matt’s robbers turn home with the loot. Borka and his followers appear and demand a share. They begin shooting, and Bumper is struck in the throat by an arrow. Matt’s men return fire; Noddle-Pete says two or three of Borka’s men were hit in turn. What began as an ambush of travelers thus becomes a violent confrontation between the two bands, with the stolen goods as its immediate prize and the longstanding rivalry as its larger cause.

Bumper’s Wound and Matt’s Vow

Bumper’s injury turns the exchange of arrows into more than a skirmish over loot. He is feverish and inert for three days, and the arrow has damaged a tendon in his neck. On the fourth day he gets up, weak in the legs but otherwise recovering. As the tendon heals and contracts, his head tips permanently to one side, leaving him with a melancholy appearance that contrasts with his unchanged bold, merry character. The robbers are relieved that he survives; their occasional nickname for him, “Skewhead!”, is teasing rather than cruel, and Bumper is not distressed by it.

Matt, however, treats the wound as the opening of a wider campaign. Having heard what happened, he grinds his teeth and vows to break each of Borka’s men in turn, declaring that there will be an end to the Borka robbers. Ronia immediately points to the reciprocal danger: if Matt destroys Borka’s band, Matt’s own robbers could also be destroyed. Matt refuses to consider that possibility. His certainty recasts the clash as an escalating feud in which retaliation, rather than the travelers’ loss or Bumper’s recovery, now drives the next action.

Ronia’s Moral Opposition and the Wider Cost

The attack deepens a conflict that Ronia had already begun to judge by its victims rather than by the rules of the robber bands. When she first understands that Matt’s men take their goods from other people, she asks whether those people become terribly angry; Noddle-Pete confirms that they do, treating their protests as entertainment. Matt then invokes family tradition—his father and grandfather were robber chiefs before him—and announces that Ronia will inherit the calling. She rejects it outright, refusing to become a robber chief even if the victims cry. That earlier refusal gives her response to Bumper’s injury a sharper edge: she is not merely alarmed by danger to her family, but unwilling to accept the violence that the feud makes ordinary.

After Bumper is shot, Ronia’s anxiety persists beyond the immediate crisis. She had hoped the hostility between Matt and Borka would gradually subside, but instead it has flared into something more dangerous. Each morning, when Matt rides out through Wolf’s Neck with his men, she wonders how many will return unharmed; she is not at ease until they have gathered around the long table that evening, and the fear returns with the next departure. The injury has therefore altered the meaning of the bands’ rivalry for her: its consequences are no longer a distant quarrel between chiefs but a daily threat to people she loves.

Ronia’s objection also reaches beyond this single battle. She tells Matt that he may rob money and goods, but he cannot rob people without losing her as his daughter. When Noddle-Pete later proposes that a single combat between Matt and Borka might unite the robbers, Ronia identifies a more fundamental answer: the cleverest plan would be to stop robbing. Her judgment contrasts with Matt’s promise of further retaliation. The event thus places the immediate wound within a larger moral dispute: whether the bands will keep defending their violence through custom and revenge, or recognize the harm done to others and abandon robbery altogether.

Consequences for the Feud and Its Victims

The episode’s consequences extend beyond the men wounded in the exchange. The travelers have already lost provisions, skins, and money, while Matt’s threat to destroy Borka’s band risks bringing still more violence upon both groups. The sheriff’s men are a further presence in this world of competing threats: Noddle-Pete expects the travelers to complain to the sheriff, and the soldiers have persistently hunted Borka’s robbers. Yet neither the travelers’ loss nor the prospect of official pursuit redirects the chiefs from their feud. Matt focuses on revenge, while Ronia’s concern encompasses the people who may be harmed on either side.

That contrast gives Bumper’s recovery its uneasy significance. He survives, and the robbers’ teasing nickname does not trouble him, but his lasting head tilt remains a visible consequence of the violence. The band can celebrate his return and treat the injury lightly; Ronia cannot forget how quickly a raid turned into a shooting and how readily Matt answered it with a vow of further destruction. The incident therefore marks not an end to the conflict but a change in its stakes: the feud has become a recurring danger to the robbers themselves, while the people they rob remain its first, largely unheard victims.