The Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics) - James Fenimore Cooper [14]
But to return to the action of The Deerslayer, we find that Natty, although he has refused to participate in Hutter’s and March’s scalping scheme, nonetheless agrees to protect Judith and Hetty during the men’s absence. He becomes indirectly complicit in the odious plan when he agrees to collect the canoes that Hutter has hidden around the lake in order to keep them out of the hands of the Indians. Deerslayer realizes that in doing this he is involved indirectly in this repellent plan; he is not a fool. This self-consciousness on his part and Judith’s self-awareness help bring them to life as characters.
In contrast, Hurry Harry does not learn anything about himself and does not change. He remains boorish, graceless, and vulgar. Similarly, old Tom Hutter remains the reclusive buccaneer to the end, but is less boastful than Harry and mercifully spares us any effort at self justification. His is purely an amoral survival ethic. When the Indians finally scalp him without the courtesy of killing him first, he does not appear particularly surprised and proceeds to die with a certain degree of courage and perhaps even a touch of dignity Before dying, he tells Judith that he is not her real father, directing her to the trunk he has kept locked in the castle in an act that may be intended as malice, or atonement of some sort, or merely a matter-of-fact deathbed confession. Old Tom and Harry, in their scheme to attack the Indian women and children, are not men “likely to stick at trifles in matters connected with the right of the aborigines, since it is one of the consequences of aggression that it hardens the conscience, as the only means of quieting it” (p. 78).
The wily Iroquois Rivenoak is the principal foe on the Indian side. Although he seems at times almost a mirror image of a rapacious white settler bent on his own version of plunder, he is capable of growth and self-understanding, like Judith and Natty. He transforms himself, after his capture in the final battle in chapter XXX, into the noble defeated warrior who will live out the remainder of his life in captivity and dignified despair, a symbol of one of history’s losers, and a reminder of the loss of American innocence.
When Harry and Hutter’s scalping expedition fails and the Rivenoak-led Indians capture the two of them, the novel’s major action is set in motion. Deerslayer is compelled to keep his word and to protect the two sisters. The pace of the action may not be quite to the taste of someone accustomed to the brisk movement of a modern thriller like The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth, but there are plenty of twists and turns and derring-do escapes as Deerslayer matches wits with the wily Rivenoak. Deerslayer negotiates for the release of his companions, the would-be scalpers, using his linguistic skills and the adroit trade of chess pieces as wampum, a feat on a par with the Dutch purchase of the island of Manhattan for a few trinkets. Deerslayer, with Judith’s help, meets up with his “good” Indian friend, Chingachgook, and the two men plan and execute the rescue of Hist, Chingachgook’s fiancé who has been kidnapped by the Iroquois. Deerslayer is, however, captured in the process because he does not kill and silence the old Indian woman who is guarding Hist. The historical romance formula that Cooper learned from Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) and used so often in his earlier novels is present here as well—only this time the separated lovers who reunite are Chingachgook and Hist, the Native Americans.
Hetty wanders freely in and out of the Indian camp trying first to secure her father’s release. Her recitation of biblical passages calling for mercy and forgiveness does not impress Rivenoak and his braves. They politely point out that the Christian message evidently did not get through