Hunter's love
Cosimo starts to bond with his surroundings, with leaves, twigs, feathers and flutters to satisfy his need of a more intimate relationship. This bond, love is compared to the hunter's love for living things, the love which makes him point a gun at them. This love makes him want to explore more, find new hidden areas. Ironically, it is this love that often times brings destruction of life, like the hunter's metaphor, and creates an axe-loving man who destroys the same nature.
Abbé
Abbé, the old religious scholar, who taught the boys, dies after a life of uncertainty in what he believed in, but he was always firm in his beliefs. He was wandering between appreciation of new philosophic thoughts and his strict religious doctrine which clashes with those.
The brigand
There was a time in Ombrosa, where the people were living in fear from a brigand, a thief and burglar, called Gian de Brughi. Cosimo befriends this brigand and has to provide him books to read. Later in life, when he finds himself in service to the people, the narrator connects it to his friendship with the brigand. Cosimo, ironically, learned to be useful to his people from the burglar, who in a way, was a service to the people, as a name they used as a reason for every misdeed.
The old Baron
After his father's death, Biagio concludes that he didn't know much about him, that he wasn't as close as he thought. This inability to understand his father's decisions and disappointment at that time, the narrator compares to Cosimo and concludes that they all have been as far removed from him as Cosimo.
El Conde
Cosimo decides to travel to a town called Olivabassa, where he heard there were Spaniards living in the trees. They were nobles who rebelled against the king and were forced to live in the trees. Among this nobles there was only one poor man who actually had a reason to rebel. They all turned to El Conde when they needed to be reminded of the cause of their rebellion. He gave them a purpose, and he was the poorest and least important among them.
