If you didn’t catch all of the dailies this past week, you really missed an in-your-face sex act in Monday’s strip. Hoo boy! It did not leave much to the imagination and I’m surprised it got past the comic strip censors! Maybe they really do spend more time scrutinizing Pearls Before Swine, as Stephen Pastis likes to imply.

In any event, the adventure this week focused on a growing realization that something might be wrong with the Bassigator Hunting Party, based on Cherry’s tracking device (surreptitiously dropped into Rusty’s backpack) showing a total lack of movement on Cherry’s tracking app. Seems the tracker stopped at an unknown horseshoe-shaped cove in the river (as Duke described it). Neither Cherry nor Jeanette knew about it, but de-bait team member Duke described it as a hot-spot for alligators.  Curiously, everybody seemed intent on referring to the cove all week long as “the horseshoe-shaped cove”, as if the shape, itself, was somehow important. Do alligators play horseshoes?  Is the shape symbolic of an alligator’s womb?

Cherry and Jeanette got more and more concerned (OK, Jeanette was starting to panic) about what was going on and what they should do about it. Surprisingly, Mark was never a topic of this discussion, even though he was “the responsible adult on the boat”. So, rather than attempt to do something novel, such as calling Mark or Rusty on their phones, Cherry, Jeanette, and Duke decided to drive to the horseshoe-shaped cove and see what they could do to save the kids. To make this closing scene dramatic in the way intended, we have to imagine cliff-hanger music reaching a climax as we cut to the Sunday nature presentation.

This is a fair demonstration of how one’s beliefs can be challenged when physical reality conflicts with tradition and superstition.