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The first three Leatherstocking novels, however, resemble each other in that they deal in archetypes and large themes of history and legend, and do not focus centrally on the spiritual growth or consciousness of the individual character. In these Natty Bumppo plays a secondary rather than the leading role. In The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, while the myths of America’s origins hover over the story like the mists on Lake Glimmerglass, the individual characters are more “real” in that they become the center of attention. In particular, Natty Bumppo’s mental processes and emotional growth are placed in the foreground, and the large historical forces recede into the background. That is, the characters have become more real by virtue of being more truly fictional. Cooper, feeling himself liberated from the desire to instruct and from the self-imposed duty to proclaim and define the national identity, lets his imagination roam more freely. In doing so, he exhibits his full gifts as a storyteller. He also, I think, more truly captures the spirit of America, our moral contradictions and dilemmas, our aspirations and our failures.

The Deerslayer, the “darkest” of the Leatherstocking novels, is the earliest in terms of the chronological setting of the series. It is set in the environs of Lake Otsego (Glimmerglass) in the period 1740-1745, when Natty Bumppo is in his early twenties. In the fashion of the Hollywood “prequel,” Cooper takes us back to the beginning to show Natty’s early development; in doing so he provides a perspective on all of the subsequent events in the series. Inevitably, The Deerslayer is self referential, or reflexive, since the reader cannot help knowing something of what will happen (or has already happened to Natty in the previous novels). One views events through a layer of anticipation or irony as the novel calls to mind an episode from an earlier novel. When Natty tells Hetty Hunter that he will not be buried in Lake Glimmerglass but probably in “a forest grave,” we know that he will not have his wish but will be buried on the plains. When Uncas, the young son of Deerslayer’s Indian friend Chingachgook, is briefly introduced at the end of The Deerslayer as a future great chief of his people, we know that he will die in battle (has already died) in The Last of the Mohicans. When Judith Hutter proposes marriage to Natty toward the end of The Deerslayer, the reader knows that it can never happen. For Natty is fated to live alone, except for the company at times of male companions and comrades-in-arms. When he renounces the one woman he truly loves, Mabel Dunham, in The Pathfinder, we know that he cannot have loved another at some earlier point. Natty is too true and too honest, and is incapable of dissembling—as much as we might wish that he could be just a little fallible and more human.

The Deerslayer opens in the midst of a deep forest, the leafy surface of which “lay bathed in the brilliant light of a cloudless day in June” (p. 13). Two men are calling out who “had lost their way, and were searching in different directions for their path.” The different paths aptly suggest the different natures of Natty Bumppo—whose sobriquet is “the Deerslayer” because of his uncanny marksmanship—and the trapper Henry March who has the suggestive nicknames of Hurry Harry, Hurry Skurry, or just Hurry. The two have decided to travel together to the Lake Glimmerglass area after encountering each other on the way. Hurry Harry’s aim is to find an old crony Thomas Hutter, to pass the time with him and do some trapping. Hurry is, as always, in a hurry but does not necessarily have a clear goal in mind. Deerslayer is on a mission to meet up with his Delaware Indian friend Chingachgook, so that they can rescue the latter’s betrothed, who has been kidnapped by a band of hostile Indians of the Huron or Iroquois tribe. Hurry Harry, as his nickname suggests, not only wants everything now, but lacks altogether any larger sense of duty or morality. He has utter contempt for all Indians