The Troop

Dr. Tim Riggs has been Scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 52 for several years and takes on a fatherly role toward his scouts. Tim moved to the small town of North Point in the province of Prince Edward Island after completing medical school. He is the town’s only General Practitioner and is highly trusted in the community out of necessity but also because he is intelligent, responsible, caring, and morally upstanding. Tim does not have a spouse or any of his own children and doesn’t plan on having any. Instead, he cares for the community at large by tending to all their minor illnesses and injuries, and he cares for his Scouts by providing them with fatherly advice, lessons, and affection. Tim is well-informed about a variety of topics and is a careful planner, which makes him an excellent General Practitioner as well as an excellent Scoutmaster. However, Tim also has a tendency to “overthink” problems before solving them because he wants to maintain control and minimize mistakes. Normally in Tim’s life, overthinking doesn’t cause an issue because he doesn’t often have to make super-time-sensitive decisions. His overthinking does become a problem once the novel’s horrors begin to unravel. Tim becomes increasingly insecure about his tendency to think issues through thoroughly, viewing it as a “weakness” that separates him as a General Practitioner from surgeons, who do have to make decisions on the fly without pausing to conduct research or weigh the pros and cons of different options.