Characters and Story
Mark Trail, the main character, is a photojournalist and outdoor magazine writer whose assignments lead him into danger and adventure. His assignments inevitably lead him to discover environmental misdeeds, most often solved with a crushing right cross.
Trail lives in the fictional Lost Forest National Forest with his St. Bernard, Andy; veterinarian Doc Davis; Doc's daughter, and Trail's girlfriend and eventual wife, Cherry, and their adopted son, Rusty. "Mark reflects a reverence for God's creatures, nature, and the conservation of woods, water and wildlife" (Hill, 2003). His assignments in recent years have involved more sleuthing than wildlife photojournalism.
- Mark Trail - Wildlife photographer and writer for Woods and Wildlife Magazine. In his early 30s; honest and upright; his strongest imprecation is famously "What th'?!"
- Rusty - Introduced in 1999, Rusty is the son of an alcoholic and abusive father. Mark's intervention saved his life, and he was adopted by Trail in 2001.
- Andy - Mark's faithful Saint Bernard. Neutered 2000.
- Cherry Davis - Longtime (47 years) girlfriend of Mark until they married in 1993, living with Mark and her father (Doc) at Lost Forest; usually a support character, although she has sometimes (e.g., 1998) had her own wildlife adventures.
- "Doc" Davis (Tom Davis) - Veterinarian; Cherry's elderly father.
- Johnny Malotte – A presumably French-Canadian outdoorsman friend of Mark's since the 1950s, living with his family in the Quetico area of western Ontario, and recently reintroduced into the strip.
- Kelly Welly – Pretty wildlife photographer whose flirtations with Mark, and competitiveness with him, land both of them in trouble; a semiregular character.
- Bill Ellis – Mark and Kelly's editor at Woods and Wildlife Magazine, appearing intermittently when sending Mark on another assignment.
- Ranger Rick Rogers - Wildlife ranger (2006), one of Mark's ubiquitous friends and contacts around the country who tend to appear in single adventures (possibly named for the National Wildlife Federation's mascot Ranger Rick)
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Famous quotes containing the words characters and, characters and/or story:
“Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question whether the characters are not significant of themselves.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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