Mark, you are such a moron.  Seriously.  OK, get on a plane (or ride your horse for all we know…) arrive in DC, amble up to the Senator’s office, and OMG, he’s not there!!  What a shock.  The body language in the first frame is very curious.  Almost antagonistic… but then not… But clearly Trail is pissed, otherwise we would not have thrown the chair away from in from of Annie-the-Aid’s desk…

And why wouldn’t Senator Mason be at his Lake Home?  I mean it’s probably recess, right??  But Mark will do anything to get into his nice blue suit with the white shirt and red tie.  How patriotic.

Man, I thought that would never happen!  However manufactured and convoluted, the ultimate goal is to get Mark the heck out of there…  So now Mark will be traveling to DC to grapple with the forces of vested, special interests.  Does he realize that he is one himself? Or is the Conservation cause so self-evident that he need only remind Senator Mason that he “needs to do the right thing??”

I wonder if Mark can even hear Dusty in the final frame…

“What- Ol’ ‘Hud?’ Why, we go WAY BACK…” Apparently a senator is, how shall we say it?  Only as faithful as his options?  Love the name, though. The fist and surnames are interchangeable…  Mason Hudson, Hudson Mason.  I bet he has had trouble with that all his life…

And what form did your “support” take, Mr. Trail?  Knocking on doors?  Or did you dig deep and cough up the green?

Drilling on Federal Lands is all the rage, now…  gosh it’s almost like that Mormon got himself elected!  Yup, no hope for the middle class, it’s all run by the plutocrats!  More like the political, ruling elite…  I would love to have this story make a strong case for term limits, but I imagine it probably won’t go there…

Enter the Game Warden, another Ward of the State… Ever notice how the virtuous in the Trailverse are either sponging off the kindness of others (bankrupt magazines, kindly fathers in law) or have their snout planted firmly in the government trough??  And the evil types, the ones beyond redemption, are all out to make a buck, create some wealth?  We might question their motives, but they are out there , trying to rub a couple of sticks together, make a fire, get something going… yet we vilify…

Retired my ass… this guy looks like he is in his 40’s!  But of course, why wouldn’t he be retired?  Probably has put in his “hard 20” and is entitled to a full pension with medical benefits…  There’s no business that pays that well!  Go into the Service, boy!  They will take care of you as you start a whole new career before many of us consider ourselves to be middle aged…

But enough sour grapes…  Not only are there POACHERS, but good Lord–in–Heaven… SURVEYORS!  Are they public or privately funded?  What are they Surveying?  This is certainly a potentially evil twist to the story, not some throw-away line.  Some Bad Actor is looking to validate the property lines of Lost Forest!  I see a property dispute in the making!

And of course, we all know what a bunch of uncouth, unprofessional, and disrespecting louts SURVEYORS are… of course it is they who are damaging the fence lines…

Readers of Mark Trail (and I am beginning to think that there are about 6 of us…) know that Mark has a hair trigger when it comes to unleashing his Fists of Fury® in the face of imminent danger.  Nice to see that some things haven’t changed, although I was having my doubts, as the last few story lines involved the deft use of a fishing pole, a tackle from behind, and a crab kick…

What’s really odd here, almost Tarantino-esque, is that we are beginning a story line with what should be the end.  The punch that sends the bad guy packing.  But let’s also examine the evidence- No facial hair, Mark is on a first name basis, and they both enjoy the same shirt/ jacket style… clearly Ol’ Dusty here cannot be an evil-doer…  So what gives??

Oh dear… Mark has allowed himself to be put into yet another compromising position… but this is nothing new for him, he has a gun pointed at him on a fairly regular basis, it would seem odd to him if it DID NOT happen… Who is that man in the shadow’s though?  He has features that apparently do not reflect light in the normal way, looking all black and everything… Adds to the mystery, though, that’s for sure…

So now the guessing begins.  Again, there is always money on Rusty’s biological Father.  Will we ever meet him in all his corrupted glory?  And is the man alone?  How exactly does he propose to transport a 1,200 pound Bull Elk over hill and dale, mountain and stream, now that the animal has been shot?  And what does he gain by immediately playing the “false imprisonment/ kidnapping” card?  I have to admit, this story line isn’t wasting any time… In less than 3 days we have gone from supposedly scared elk running roughshod over the fence lines to Mark with a rifle pointed in his back.  Impressive…