at the moment of conflict, when the two men come face-to-face in the forest, each on the verge of murdering the other, an act of God causes a tree to fall on them both, pinning them to the ground. Caught in the same trap, the two men eventually come to see how useless their feud has been and agree to become friends.

The twist in the story comes as they are waiting for help. Each man has a party of men searching for them, but it is not clear which party will find them first. When someone does appear, however, it is not men but wolves. The two men, who were once so eager to kill each other, now face a common, horrible fate.

There are a few ways to understand what the wolves represent. One way to read it is to see the wolves as representative of a cruel nature, ambivalent to the concerns of men. In this reading, it becomes clear that neither man "owned" the forest and that nature, in the form of the wolves, was asserting its superiority to man. Another way to understand the wolves is as the "interlopers" of the title—an outside force that prevents the private feelings of friendship between the men from becoming public. In this ironic reading, the wolves form a counterpart to the tree—in the same way the tree crashing down is a chance occurrence that makes their reconciliation possible, the wolves are a similar random event that prevents this reconciliation from bearing any of the fruit the men anticipated.