These Silent Woods

Finch and Cooper go hunting again. Cooper shoots a deer and allows Finch to track it. As she cuts it open, she asks about the girl and fantasizes about where she came from. Cooper tries to come up with a plausible explanation to satisfy Finch, but he remains privately worried about how much he doesn’t know.

Scotland comes over later that day and asks them about their trip to the river. Cooper tries to lie, but Finch reveals everything to him about the girl. Cooper again considers how nervous Scotland makes him, and whether he is revealing everything he knows. It also makes him uncomfortable that Scotland knows about their past and therefore has leverage over them. Although Cooper is wary, Finch is not, and she “trusts” him, which is why Cooper finds Scotland “dangerous.”

The following night, as Cooper tends to the chickens, he remembers his time in Kabul. On his third tour, he, Jake, and others set out to find two missing soldiers. They found their comrades’ bodies strung up but realized too late that this was a trap. Jake stepped on an IED and was severely injured. As they hunkered down in the basement, Cooper quoted Psalm 23 to his friend, but Jake responded by quoting from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, leading Cooper to ask him to talk more about Victorian poetry.