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To what, or to whom, is the Deerslayer loyal? This is a more dif ficult question. D. H. Lawrence has described Natty as an American Odysseus embarked on an epic journey.10 To Balzac he was “a magnificent moral hermaphrodite, born between the savage and the civilized states of man, who will live as long as literature endures” (cited in Wallace, Early Cooper and His Audience, p. 168). Natty’s identity vexes even himself, starting with the question of his name. When he meets Hetty Hutter and is asked his name, he introduces himself with a string of names: his given name Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo and the names given him by the friendly Delaware Indians—Straight-tongue, the Pigeon, the Lap-ear, and finally the Deerslayer. Deerslayer’s parents died while he was very young. He was raised a Christian by Moravian missionaries who worked closely with the friendly Delaware Indians. At age fourteen, he went to live with the Indians. He never learned to read or write, so he couldn’t recognize his name if he saw it. But he is quite a linguist, being fluent apparently in several Indian dialects. To the Indians of his boyhood, and now to the hunters and colonial authorities, he answers to the name of Deerslayer. He will also soon acquire the sobriquet of Hawkeye, given him by the dying Indian warrior the Lynx, whom he has mortally wounded in his first encounter with the enemy. Though Natty, or Deerslayer, feels a profound reverence for, and is completely at home in, the forest, he is not a Natural Man, a Noble Savage, or an Adam, notwithstanding the edenic setting and his love of the Glimmerglass forest. His appreciation of nature is refracted through a layer of self-consciousness; he admires nature almost as if viewing a work of art, as if beholding nature’s beauty while being caught in a Wordsworthian “spot in time.”11

Moreover, Natty is not a man who lives wholly unattached to human society. He is bound to society by virtue of having grown up in or near a settlement, and he makes his living through the scouting services he renders to clients from society Deerslayer is thus a more social being than either Hurry Harry or old Tom Hutter, both of whom are true loners. But even they depend on society when they buy or trade for certain goods or, in the case of the hideous scheme they contrive, seek Indian scalps for the bounties they can get from the colonial government. Unlike Harry and Tom, however, Natty has interests that lie beyond the economic or social. He knows that the French and Indian War of 1744 (King George’s War) is being waged, and he wishes, like Achilles or Odysseus, for glory in battle. He longs for the chance to prove himself in war, and not merely to display marksmanship in shooting deer and to show his prowess as a hunter. The novel’s full title is The Deerslayer: or The First War-Path. Settlements, towns, clusters, forts, and all the manifestations of civilization are not to Deerslayer’s liking, with their advances, forest clearings, comforts, “improvements,” and other signs of material progress, but he knows that civilization must, or at any rate will, advance. Moreover, he knows that it has some legitimate claims. Yet he has an innate sense of a moral order that is “higher” than society itself, partly the product of his Christian upbringing. Although not handsome, in contrast to Hurry Harry, Deerslayer’s “expression ... of guileless truth, sustained by an earnestness of purpose, and a sincerity of feeling” (pp. 14—15) endears him and renders him remarkable to all who meet him, though his penchant for telling the truth can be an irritant as well. Natty does not know (yet), though readers of The Pioneers and The Prairie know, that his moral outlook and purity of purpose will prove to be incompatible with the march of civilization, and will cause an irreparable breach between him and society.

Although The Deerslayer is not free of authorial intrusions, Cooper for the most part lets the story tell us how, and how far, Natty’s acute moral awareness puts him at odds with the