47 pages • 1 hour read
Tristan BancksTwo Wolves
Tristan BancksFiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 20-29Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 20 Summary: “Apricots”
Ben’s mother comes outside to bring Ben back in for some food, and Ben hides the phone in the car so he isn’t caught snooping. Ben is anxious and refuses to eat. The headline that Ben read on the phone said, “Bank Error in Your Favor,” following up that a bank mistakenly deposited $7.2 million into Ben’s father’s account (130). Ben impulsively says the words “7.2 million,” and his father pins him against the wall in anger. Ben begins to cry, and his father mocks him and storms off into the night.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Think I Better Run”
Ben’s mother comforts him and tells him that they don’t know what to do. Ben tells his mother to not listen to his father, but she tells him that she doesn’t know how. Ben considers his situation and decides that he needs to run away. He tries to sneak away through the trapdoor he cut in the floor earlier, but his mother wakes up as he does so.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Into the Wild”
Ben waits for his mother to wake his father up and reveal Ben’s escape attempt, but instead, she goes back to sleep. Ben manages to escape from the cabin and decides to head down the slope to the creek so he can escape in the raft. Before he can, he hears the hiss of a walkie-talkie and sees the dark shapes of mysterious men in the woods.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Flesh and Blood”
Ben decides to go back into the cabin through the hole in the floor so he can wake his parents and help them escape. The four of them slip underneath the cabin through the hole, but when Ben’s father hits his head on an exposed beam, the police move in to arrest them. Ben’s parents run for the trees but forget the bag with the money behind. Ben grabs Olive and the bag and makes his escape, dodging officers as he runs. However, he hits his head on a branch during the escape and gets knocked out.
Chapter 24 Summary: “The Fugitive”
Ben wakes up, and he and Olive flee to the raft. They float down the river with the bag of money, avoiding the police and searching for their parents in the woods. They go over a small waterfall, and Ben falls off the raft. He surfaces and finds Olive, who has managed to stay on the raft, and the two of them continue down the river, escaping the police. Ben hears two shots and hopes they aren’t for his parents.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Hope”
Ben awakes in the morning to the sound of helicopter rotors and finds that Olive is missing. He searches for her and discovers that she is waving to the officers for rescue, claiming that they’re there to save them. Ben convinces her to flee, and the two children run off into the woods. The helicopter pursues them as they run, and eventually, Olive convinces Ben to turn themselves in. Just as they decide to do so, the helicopter flies off, stranding them in the woods.
Chapter 26 Summary: “Stuck”
Olive and Ben go through their pockets to see what they have with them that could help them survive in the woods. They discover that their only food is a moldy sandwich. Ben and Olive search around the woods for food and find figs to eat.
Chapter 27 Summary: “First Night”
Ben and Olive spend the day wandering the woods searching for food. When night falls, Ben stays up to watch for danger while Olive sleeps. As Ben struggles to stay awake, he tries to figure out a plan to save them. Ben accidentally falls asleep and awakes to the sound of footsteps. Worried that it’s not the police, Ben hides from the sound, waits for the stranger to pass, and wonders if he “[will] ever sleep again” (173).
Chapter 28 Summary: “Tangled”
Ben tells Olive about the money, and the two of them head back upstream toward the cabin. Neither of them has eaten in a day and a half, and they both become weak and covered in scrapes as they clamber over mossy boulders. Ben and Olive wonder whether their Uncle Chris helped their father with his crimes, and Ben wonders if he’s the same since he also took the money.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Tempest”
As they try to sleep, the weather turns, and lightning starts to strike the trees. Ben decides that they need to find shelter. He picks up the dozing Olive, accidentally dropping $50,000 in the process. Ben realizes that he has so much money with him that $50,000 is just a drop in the bucket. As the storm gets worse, Ben leaves the rest of the money so he can carry Olive to safety. Ben finds a large fig tree and leans Olive against it as he constructs a bed for her out of palm fronds. He also constructs a barrier against the wind and rain.
Chapters 20-29 Analysis
This section of the novel contains the hardest challenge for Ben and Olive—surviving for days in the woods. Nature, in Two Wolves, symbolizes the barriers Ben faces in this situation. Just as nature has made his escape from the police functionally impossible (because there is no escape from the wilderness), his father has made a normal childhood impossible through his cruelty and now, his illegal activity. As in Ben’s dream earlier, his father is associated with the difficult aspects of nature, with Ben attempting to escape both. However, Ben eventually, after much struggle, triumphs over nature. As he and Olive make their way through the woods, Ben wonders whether the “force of the wild all around them […] was for or against them” (164). This thought mirrors his internal struggles surrounding his father; he must deal with his father but is unsure whether he represents a positive or negative force. Both are portrayed as obstacles to be overcome, and Ben overcomes them in similar ways; his initial state of fear is replaced by courage once he realizes he needs to act.
One of the most important chapters of this section is Chapter 23, in which Ben makes the significant decision to help his family escape rather than give his parents up to the police. By this point in the narrative, Ben is aware of his parents’ lies and the danger the family is in, and he resents the abuse he has endured on this trip, including physical violence from his father and being locked in the cabin for a full day without food or a bathroom. However, once he actually tries to escape, he realizes that he “need[s] to tell his parents. They should escape too. Through his hole. He would still run but he could not leave them to be caught” (142). This decision is informed by Ben’s priorities and values, just as all Differing Concepts of Justice are. At this moment, justice means giving his parents a chance at freedom, even if he doesn’t intend to stay with them.
In the first lines of Chapter 26, Ben justifies his decision-making to Olive, saying that he did it “[t]o protect her from whatever happens to kids after their parents go to jail or die” (161). This thought reframes Ben’s intentions in escaping; rather than trying to protect his parents, he flees to protect himself and Olive from foster care, which does not necessarily provide a healthy home environment for children and often separates siblings. This shift reflects Ben’s character growth; as he’s been caring for Olive in the woods, he has also become more protective of her, and their bond has been strengthened. In Two Wolves, differing concepts of justice can divide groups of people who disagree, but they can also bring people together, especially when one person decides that justice means protecting or caring for another.
Despite this section containing the most difficult moments for Ben and Olive, it also contains their most salient moments of personal growth. Ben’s relationship with masculinity shifts; rather than viewing it as something to fear due to his father’s abuse, he instead starts to view it as a way to protect himself and his sister. Before, Ben’s father directly associated masculinity with toughness; as narrated in Chapter 16, “[h]e was trying to sound tough and manly while still refusing to eat the meat. He didn’t like it when Dad said he wasn’t tough enough” (96). In this earlier chapter, masculinity is something scary that should be faked when necessary—Ben associates it with the way that his father behaves. However, after getting lost in the woods, Ben tells Olive, “Don’t be a baby,” a comment his father frequently says to him, and then he thinks that he “felt bad for being so harsh but unless he was tough on himself, tough on Olive, they would not make it back to the cabin before dark” (175). Ben’s thoughts about masculinity have shifted; despite its earlier negative associations, Ben now sees toughness as necessary to save himself and his sister—notably, Ben employs this in a life-or-death situation in which he and his sister must endure the wilderness, while Ben’s father demands stereotypical masculinity when there are no real stakes involved. As such, Ben comes to see courage and resourcefulness—associated with masculinity—as tools for specific situations. His opinions are shifting throughout this section, demonstrating the contours of his character arc.
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