How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
He didn't dislike people, he merely found them irrational; animals, he said, were more consistent, their behavior at least as predictable. To him that's what Hitler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason. (6.37)
Hitler actually comes up a few times in the novel, suggesting that he still occupies a relatively important place in the narrator's imagination. Here, the narrator describes her father's perspective on Hitler's defining characteristic, which (according to him) wasn't evil so much as irrationality.
Quote #5
"A snooping base," he said, bird-watchers, binoculars, it all fits. They know this is the kind of place that will be strategically important during the war."
"What war?" I asked, and Anna said "Here we go." (11.48)
David apparently believes that the U.S. and Canada will go to war over the latter's water resources, so his theory is that some bird-watching Americans are there scoping things out and setting up a base. Anna seems to have heard this all before…
Quote #6
We reached the first portage at eleven. My feet moved over the rocks and mud, stepping in my own day-old footprints, backtracking; in my brain the filaments, trails reconnected and branched, we killed other people besides Hitler, before my brother went to school and learned about him and the games became war games. Earlier we would play we were animals; our parents were the humans, the enemies who might shoot or catch us, we would hide from them. (18.36)
Even before the narrator's brother brought the knowledge of war home from school, their games were conflict and violence oriented; in those days, it was about the conflict between the humans and the animals (a tension that the narrator still perceives in her present day).