The young son of Kenneth and Mildred Rattner, growing up fatherless in an ancient log house near Red Branch. Resourceful and self-reliant, he traps muskrats, hunts hawks for bounty, and roams the countryside day and night. He forms a deep bond with Marion Sylder after rescuing him from a wrecked car, not knowing that Sylder killed his father. His mother has made him swear to find the man who took his daddy away.

An elderly hermit living alone in a weathered shack in the hollow below Red Mountain with his aged hound Scout. Somewhere between eighty-three and eighty-four years old, he is a keen observer of weather and seasons, a keeper of old mountain ways. He guards the spray-pit where a body lies hidden, cutting a cedar each winter to cover the remains. Fierce and independent, he despises the government installation on the mountaintop and eventually shoots holes in it with his shotgun.

The local constable in the Red Branch area, a stocky and methodical lawman who investigates the wrecked Plymouth and suspects Sylder of bootlegging. He intimidates the young John Wesley Rattner, confiscates his traps, and later beats Sylder savagely after his arrest. Despite his official position, he is regarded by some as a traitor who sells out his own neighbours for pay.

A drifting petty thief and con man who moves his wife and son to Red Branch before abandoning them. He claims to be a decorated war veteran with a platinum plate in his head, but this is a fabrication. Stocky, unkempt, and repulsive in manner, he cadges rides and steals from whoever crosses his path. His ceaseless, wheedling talk masks a readiness for violence.

The county humane officer, a thin and spindly man who accompanies Gifford on his investigations. He has a reputation for cruelty - once shooting a dog seven times with a .22 rifle in front of children. He is gullible and greedy, spending three days sifting ashes at the spray-pit searching for a nonexistent platinum plate from a dead man's skull.

A resourceful and fiercely independent young man from Red Branch, Tennessee. Born in 1913, Sylder left home at nineteen and returned five years later with money and a gleaming Ford coupe. He works variously as a carpenter, fertiliser plant worker, and bootlegger, running whiskey from the mountains to Knoxville. Lean-hipped and tall, he is generous with friends but dangerous when cornered, capable of both tenderness and lethal violence.

Kenneth Rattner's devout and enduring wife, raising her son John Wesley alone in a log house near Red Branch. She is a fiercely religious woman with a gaunt, powerful face, sustained by her faith and her conviction that her husband was a godly man wrongfully taken from her. She extracts from her son an oath to find and punish whoever harmed his father.

A resourceful country boy around John Wesley's age who becomes his close friend. He keeps a tethered buzzard, hunts with a rifle, and has a talent for trapping. His grandfather knew Arthur Ownby from their days cutting railway sleepers together. He and John Wesley share adventures in the caves, fields, and creeks around Red Branch.

The last surviving son of a whiskey-making mountain family, living with his elderly mother in a squat house in the hollow. He produces moonshine that Marion Sylder hauls to Knoxville. Reputed to be dangerously mean, he once turned his own mother over to deputies to protect himself during a raid.

A heavyset local man from the Tipton clan who is a drinking companion and sometime partner of Marion Sylder. He helps Sylder on various escapades, including picking up women on the mountain road. Good-natured but rough, he lives with his wife on Henderson Valley Road.