The Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics) - James Fenimore Cooper [315]
Chapter XVII
1 (p. 279) “with a Mingo it may be different”: Deerslayer rejects outright acting as a double-agent—that is, pretending to accept Rivenoak’s plan and then double-crossing him and warning Chingachgook and the others. Rivenoak shrewdly plays on Deerslayer’s potential liking for Judith. But Deerslayer, by rejecting the temptation, undoubtedly saves himself from a Rivenoak triple-cross. Rivenoak would certainly have killed Judith and him after disposing of the others. Deerslayer’s rather cold implied dismissal of Judith—“There’s reason ag’in in any very great love for either”—is inexplicable and troubling. He resists, however, saying anything ungentlemanly and does not allow R‘ivenoak to trick him into lies or false admissions. The narrator’s subtext, evidently, is this: Yes, this is a romance, and there is a lover’s reunion, but it is between Chingachgook and Hist.
2 (p. 281) The messenger ... and doubtless bore with him the intelligence of all that had happened: The messenger, undoubtedly, also carried instructions to proceed with an attack on the castle.
Chapter XVIII
1 (p. 299) the deep silence of midnight: Cooper is using the term in a general sense to denote the night atmosphere. It was already midnight when Hetty woke and started walking, when the young women talked for a while, and when Judith paddled around for half an hour looking for the ark. The actions of the night aren’t over yet. Cooper, though generally thought to be old-fashioned in his narrative techniques, frequently retraces events back and forth in time from the perspectives of different participants.
Chapter XIX
1 (p. 318) took his measures accordingly: It is a measure of Cooper’s use of realism that he gives an elaborate account in this paragraph of how the Indians got to the ark. Nonetheless, we must be willing to give the storyteller a certain license. What Cooper does not account for is how Chief Rivenoak managed to get to the scene. When Hurry Harry shot the young Indian woman, it must have been around 1:00 A.M. The chief then assembled his thirteen braves for a war council and made his way north, presumably along the shore, to join his companions in the northerly camp and supervise the work in the ark. He had to travel several miles, and all of this had to be done before the first light, which at that time of year would be about 4:45 A.M.
Chapter XXI
1 (p. 337) the blow of the knife that proved mortal: In a scalping, the skin is removed from the top of the head, from the upper forehead, and all around the skull above the ears, as Cooper graphically describes in chapter XX. The skull itself is usually not penetrated to cause mortal brain injury, but one may suppose that the great loss of blood and the danger of infection might well prove fatal under frontier conditions. Hutter’s death affirms the moral order in Cooper’s universe since he had twice set out to scalp Indian women and children.
2 (p. 338) “Father!” ... give me more water”: The motives behind Hutter’s deathbed confession have never been clear. He must have known that the revelation would affect the daughters differently: It would relieve Judith but distress Hetty. The truth would eventually come out in the trunk’s contents, in any event, and he perhaps simply felt the desire to tell the truth. His request for a biblical passage for “cooling the tongue of a man who was burning in hellfire” (p. 340) suggests something of a deathbed conversion.
Chapter XXII
1 (p. 363) “I’m out on furlough”: Rivenoak’s motives in furloughing Deerslayer are puzzling. He is running considerable risks, and what is he gaining? If Natty doesn’t come back, the Indians lose the canoe, and they face another