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.