Collapsing floors, rushing rivers, floundering swimmers, dramatic rescues, and sitcom dialog! This strip has none of that! Oh, wait. My mistake. I was looking at Hi and Lois. As far as Mark Trail is concerned, it was definitely jam-packed.

As Cricket Bro was finally freed from the hole in the cave floor, the predicted flooding began in earnest. Despite rescue ropes, Cricket Bro was to panicked to cooperate. But then, all of the flooding caused a bigger floor collapse, sending both Mark and Cricket Bro into an underground river. Cricket Bro provided comic relief as he bobbed up and down moaning he will die. Alas. Meanwhile Mark told Cricket Bro to suck it up (not meaning the water) and just swim towards the opening in the wall just ahead. Mark was surprisingly quite upbeat and positive during this unscheduled underground swim, which seemed curious, but I suppose he was trying to keep a positive attitude for Cricket Bro. But why?

Given that Cricket Bro and his ne’er-do-well brother, Crypto Bro (Jadsen!)—the Bro Brothers—have made it their obsession to humiliate, ruin, or even kill Mark Trail at virtually every opportunity, it does seem odd that Mark will put all of that aside so easily.

Anyway, where did we leave these two…? Oh, yeah. Well, rather than pass over a waterfall or into raging rapids as they swam out of the cave, Mark and Cricket Bro simply got dumped into a river, like waste water from a local refinery or golf course. Totally unexciting and anticlimactic. But that’s standard for Jules Rivera’s stories. Still, Cricket Bro was totally panicked as he bobbed up and down in the river while floating ten feet from the shore. He began making extravagant promises to Mark that he will certainly forget immediately when he gets rescued by the motorboat that conveniently just pulled up, led by the doubtable rescuer, Ranger Shaw, along with CB’s brother, Crypto Bro. The week ended with The Bro Brothers relishing their livestreamed catastrophe. They were anxious to do this again, provoking Mark to get upset about them ignoring his sage advice. But as we see, Mark doesn’t seem to learn, either.

It looks like the crawfish I spotted swimming sideways in the cave last Tuesday turns out to be an enlarged cave shrimp swimming sideways. Since they live exclusively in pools and ground waters in caves, I am curious where the one we saw last Tuesday came from, since the floodwaters just came in. Perhaps there were some small pools of water along the edges of the cave.

There are only nine known species of cave shrimp, several of them restricted to single caves or cave systems, mostly in Southern states, but some known in Hawaii! Very interesting. Too bad Jules Rivera just missed out on the fact that cave shrimp were the “2025 Cave Animal of the Year” for the National Speleological Society!