The Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics) - James Fenimore Cooper [12]
The story unfolds in a straightforward fashion. Deerslayer and Hurry Harry, after finding each other in the opening scene in the forest, decide to look for the Thomas Hutter family. They retrieve a canoe Harry has previously hidden in a hollow log, and they paddle out to the fortress home that Hutter has built on piles driven into the shoals on a shallow point of Lake Glimmerglass (far enough offshore to afford a strong defensive position). Hutter and his daughters are not at Muskrat Castle, as the structure is known, but have gone off on the ark, a separate floating home that is usually anchored or parked at the castle. Deerslayer and Harry locate Hutter trapping in the river that flows from the lake. The whole entourage in chapter IV makes a narrow escape from Chief Rivenoak and his Indian companions (in the episode parodied by Mark Twain).
After Deerslayer and his companions hightail it back to the capacious and nearly impregnable castle, Hutter, a gruff old trapper and ex-pirate, teams up with Harry March to hatch a scheme that causes Deerslayer to be thrown into the first of the many moral crises he will face. Hutter and March want to sneak out at night in a canoe, attack the Indian camp at which, they have determined, the women and children have been left temporarily unguarded, and make their escape back to the castle bearing the scalps of many of these Indians. British, French, and Spanish colonial authorities in North America of fered bounties on the scalps of unfriendly Indians, and paid their Indian allies just as they paid mercenary troops in Europe. Natty, of course, will have none of it. He argues vociferously against white men engaging in scalp taking and refuses to have anything to do with the scheme:
“My gifts are not scalpers’ gifts, but such as belong to my religion and color. I’ll stand by you, old man, in the ark or in the castle, the canoe or the woods, but I’ll not unhumanize my natur’ by falling into ways that God intended for another race” (p. 75).
Natty’s reasoning is interesting. It would be a mistake to regard him as a modern human rights advocate. He does not regard scalping as wrong under all circumstances for all peoples. He has the notion of “gifts” to which he refers at numerous points in the novel. There are white “gifts” and Indian “gifts” as well as male and female “gifts.” While it is wrong for whites to scalp their enemies, it is not wrong for Indians to take the scalps of warriors they have defeated in honorable battle, because it accords with the Indian desire to not have to go alone into the next world. It is even all right for Indians to take white scalps, provided only that the victim is dead before the scalp is removed.
Deerslayer understands and accepts different values, it seems, and is thus an ideal candidate for reconciling the clash of norms that inevitably accompanies the settling of the American wilderness by diverse groups of white settlers, colonial authorities, and indigenous natives. However, the notion of the gift, as frequently invoked by Deerslayer, is ambiguous. Gifts evidently are partly rooted in nature, in human nature as well as in the natural order. One is entitled to do what one’s nature allows. But the gift is also connected to the social