“No, not today,” Volanthen said. “There's two of us. You have to dive. We're coming. Many people are coming. We are the first. Many people come.”

And many people did come. The next day Thai SEALs ferried food and water and blankets to the Wild Boars, and three of them, along with a military medic, stayed with the team.

But the Wild Boars still had to be brought out, and no one was quite sure how that would happen. Or even if it could happen.

The families of the Wild Boars never left the park. They were secure in their own area, separate from the legion of journalists who filled the parking lot, and they napped on cots and in plastic chairs while they kept vigil. On occasion, monks would come to pray with them, including, at least twice, a forest monk by the name of Kruba Boonchum Yannasangwalo. He is 53 years old, revered in parts of Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos, and somewhat of a celebrity, as far as monks go: A souvenir stand at the temple where Coach Ek lives sells bracelets purportedly woven by him. (It also sells consecrated Phra Ruang Lamphun amulets, which are said to protect the holder from harm, and one of which Coach Ek wore around his neck. They have since become a very popular item.)

Kruba Boonchum came to the cave after a woman he did not know, and who did not know him, claimed to have had a dream about the cave. In it, the woman wrote on Facebook four days after the Wild Boars went missing, the spirit of the cave visited her and said she would not release the boys until Kruba Boonchum came to pray. So he came on Friday, June 29, and meditated and prayed. “Don't worry,” he announced. “The boys are safe. They will come out in a few days.” He prayed and meditated the next day, too, after which he said, “The SEAL divers are not far from the boys.”

There were many theories about which boy would go first—the youngest, the weakest, the strongest—but in the end it came down to a boy who volunteered.

Which was true, except it was Brits and not SEALs. And that could all just be a coincidence, a gentle monk dispensing hope. Or it could be, as some people believe, that Kruba Boonchum, in another life long ago, had been a stable boy who was killed because he loved a princess, and that princess, in her grief, had stabbed herself and bled to death in what is now a cave called Tham Luang. It is possible, because anything is possible when miracles are involved, that the spirit of the cave, the princess whose blood runs through it, was waiting for him to return.

There were, in the beginning, three main thoughts about how to extricate the Wild Boars. One was deceptively simple: Wait until the monsoons passed and the waters drained to the point where they could walk out, which probably would have been November or maybe even December. But the logistics—the deceptive part—made that option almost certainly fatal. Even if no trained personnel stayed with them, the boys and Coach Ek would need to be fed: Thirteen boys eating three times a day for, generously, 40 days is more than 1,500 meals, all of which would need to be ferried in by divers flirting with death themselves each time they went under.

This was not an academic concern. On July 6, after the boys had been found and a rescue plan was being drafted, a retired Thai SEAL named Saman Gunan was positioning spare oxygen tanks inside the cave, backups for divers making their way to the boys and back, a grueling exercise that took, depending on the skill of the diver and the conditions in the cave, anywhere from five to twenty-three hours round-trip. Gunan was 37 years old, married, a triathlete in excellent physical condition, and a highly trained diver. He was also a volunteer. “Loaded all my stuff onto the plane. I'm ready to fly to Chiang Rai,” he said a few days earlier in a selfie video obtained by the Associated Press. “See you at Tham Luang in Chiang Rai. May good luck be on our side to bring the boys back home.”