The Interlopers: Summary & Analysis

Beginning

Ulrich von Gradwitz patrols his forest on a wild winter night, looking for Georg Znaeym, who continues to hunt on land that the courts have ruled belongs to Ulrich. The legal dispute has been ongoing for three generations; it has become personal hatred. Both men know the other will be out on such a night. Ulrich's men are positioned elsewhere; he is alone. He comes around a tree and finds Georg standing there, rifle in hand. For a moment neither fires.

Rising action

In that moment of hesitation, a great beech tree, torn by the storm, falls across both men, pinning them to the ground. Neither is seriously hurt but neither can move. They lie a few yards apart, able to see each other, able to speak, unable to do anything else. Each threatens the other — his men will arrive first; the other can expect no mercy. The storm continues. Then Ulrich, lying there with the cold and the pain and the night, has a thought: what if he offers Georg a drink from his wine flask instead? What if he ends it?

Climax

Ulrich calls out to Georg with the offer of reconciliation. Georg is silent for a long time. Then he agrees. The two men, pinned side by side by a fallen tree, talk themselves into peace: they will tell their men not to fight, they will become friends, the whole three-generation feud will be over. Both are moved by their own generosity. They shout together for help and wait.

Ending

Figures appear at the top of the hill, moving through the trees toward them. Ulrich asks Georg, whose eyesight is better, whether they are his men or Georg's. Georg looks. He starts to laugh: they are not men. The story ends on the question of who Ulrich sees. Saki's last line tells us: wolves.

Ulrich von Gradwitz and Georg Znaeym

The two men are deliberately parallel: both hereditary enemies, both proud, both out alone on the same night for the same reason. Saki does not distinguish them morally or individually — they are interchangeable positions in a feud neither of them began. This parallel construction is what makes the reconciliation possible (they understand each other completely) and what makes the ending equally just (nature destroys both equally, regardless of who had the legal title to the land).

The forest

The Carpathian forest is described as wild and ancient. It belongs to neither man in any meaningful sense — the court gave Ulrich the title, but the forest does not recognise courts. The falling tree is the forest's verdict: it pins both men simultaneously, making their weapons and their hatred irrelevant. The wolves at the end are the forest's final word on human territorial disputes.

Human conflict versus nature

The feud between Ulrich and Georg is the kind of dispute human beings construct and maintain through generations — legal, territorial, personal. The forest does not participate in this logic. The falling tree is not punishment or justice; it is indifferent accident. What makes it ironic is that it removes the men's ability to act on their hatred precisely long enough for them to overcome it — and then delivers them to the wolves. Nature is not a moral force; it simply does not care about the categories human beings apply to land.

Reconciliation too late

The story's emotional power comes from the genuineness of the reconciliation. Ulrich and Georg really do become friends, lying there in the snow. The reader believes them. The friendship is not ironic — it is the thing the story values. What makes the ending devastating is that the reconciliation comes too late to save either man, and that its impossibility in the abstract (they would never have made peace on their own feet) was precisely what made it possible. The tree created the only conditions under which the feud could end.

The twist and what it argues

The approaching figures the men take for rescuers are wolves. The twist is not simply a surprise ending: it is an argument. Two men spend their lives in a feud over land, find peace in extremity, call for help together — and nature sends wolves. The human drama of the feud and the human achievement of the reconciliation are equally irrelevant to the forest. Saki, writing in 1919 as the First World War ended, may have had something broader in mind: the way human conflicts exhaust themselves just in time to be overtaken by something worse.