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Natty and Judith have a final poignant encounter a day later in a canoe after they have buried Hetty next to her mother in the lake. Judith asks Deerslayer to stop his paddling and spend a few moments with her apart from the other canoes. Here, in a scene that has not received the critical attention it deserves, Judith pours out her soul to Deerslayer. It is clear how much she has grown as a person; her tender affection and love for Deerslayer are obvious; her anxiety but yet her courage in facing the future are unmistakable. At first Deerslayer plays dumb, hoping to get by without directly answering her. She is at last forced to make a direct appeal, a straight-out proposal of marriage to him. He rebuffs her. Then, painfully, she asks him if it is something Hurry Harry has said about her that has poisoned his attitude toward her. Deerslayer is at his most eloquent; for once, he is silent. He lets the small lie stand, knowing it will hurt her less than the full truth: He doesn’t love her, doesn’t respect her enough, and doesn’t want to live out his life with her. Nor does he trust her steadfastness, and he sees that her nature is at bottom to want the spotlight or at least the comforts of the settlement and the other good things of civilized life that he cannot give her. They cannot live a life on the lake, in the castle; it won’t work. Perhaps he doesn’t want to tell her the deeper truth: that he knows he has been condemned by his (novelistic) creator to live out his life alone as the archetypical rootless American, without ever experiencing love. He will be an isolate—cast out by society, his values trampled upon—and will die on the barren plains, his bones bleaching in the sun, far from the graves of his parents near the sea and far from his beloved forests.

The novel ends, in a shift of perspective, fifteen years later when Deerslayer, Chingachgook (Hist has died in the meantime), and Uncas, the son of Hist and Chingachgook, revisit the scene of the previous action. They are stirred by memories and experience feelings of melancholy They find the ark wrecked and the castle in ruins, but Deerslayer finds a ribbon of Judith’s attached to the wreckage of the ark and ties it to his rifle. Deerslayer has a pang as he thinks of Judith. She is still on his mind when he inquires about her at a nearby garrison, and a soldier “who had lately come from England, was enabled to tell our hero, that Sir Robert Warley [the British officer of fifteen years before] lived on his paternal estates, and that there was a lady of rare beauty in the lodge, who had great influence over him, though she did not bear his name” (p. 522). Natty “never knew” whether this was Judith or some other victim of that officer, nor “would it be pleasant or profitable to inquire.” The friends make their way in silence toward the Mohawk “to rush into new adventures, as stirring and as remarkable as those which had attended their opening career on this lovely lake.” But lest we miss the larger point of this dark narrative, Cooper begins his final sentence with the admonition: “We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true....”

Bruce L. R. Smith is a fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University He previously was a professor of government at Columbia University (1966-1979), a deputy assistant secretary in the U. S. Department of State (1779-1880), and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. (1980-1996). He is the author or editor of sixteen scholarly books, and he continues to lecture widely in the United States and abroad. He annotated and wrote the introduction for Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove in the Barnes & Noble Classics series.

Notes

1 On Cooper’s influence and his role in generating an audience for fiction, see James D. Wallace, Early Cooper and His Audience, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

2 Mark Twain forcefully expressed his views on the American