Richard has a lean, winter-hardened build and moves with a slight forward pitch, as though he is always walking into wind. His brown hair lies in uneven, static-lifted strands beneath a wool cap. His pale yellow eyes have a raptor's fixed, unsettling focus: he turns his whole head to track movement and seems to notice small motions before their owners do. His skin has the waxen cast of someone who has been cold too long, and his breath fogs even in rooms that should be warm. A detail few expect of a young, capable gunman is that he carries a tiny paper notebook of bird sightings and carefully records them in the margins of business calculations. He leaves the impression of a man listening to something just over one's shoulder.

Richard is methodical and guarded, yet capable of fierce, almost reckless tenderness toward people he considers family. In ordinary company he is dryly observant and reluctant to volunteer personal details. When someone is in danger, he stops debating and acts. When discussing his father, he becomes precise to the point of cruelty, as if exact wording could keep grief from changing shape. He wants independence, but still measures himself by the family he left.

Born in Delaware to a Swedish father, Richard remembers his father and uncles with painful clarity: their voices, their hands on his shoulders, and the way they left with him to search along the Atlantic. His memories of his mother are much less distinct, and he has never decided whether that is ordinary childhood forgetting or something taken from him. Richard died while still young. The eagle spirit that restored him gave him its eyes, taking his blue human eyes in exchange; the eagle now bears those blue eyes, a living reminder of their pact and of the person Richard used to be. He was raised afterward by the Jones family, who adopted him as their eldest child. He grew up with the quiet assumption that being the eldest son might make him an heir, though no one has promised him anything. He became close to Aaron, whose concern for him has grown as Richard's breath has turned cold and his moods more distant. Alexander, another younger brother with a history of death he and Richard have never discussed, is trying to find him whenever work allows. Alexander believes he would make the better leader and heir. Richard left the family bitterly, pulled toward a hunt he cannot explain away. Now a mathematical statistics expert for businesses, he can find patterns in risk and loss, but cannot sort his own memories from the eagle's. The spirit sometimes takes control of his body without warning. He has relearned Swedish and is heading toward Northern Europe, hoping to find his blood father for a conversation he suspects will end in violence. A spirit of war, wind, and lightning has also begun to crawl into him. Richard knows the Wechuge legends and fears he is becoming the kind of hunger they describe.