Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

some earlier point. Natty is too true and too honest, and is incapable of dissembling—as much as we might wish that he could be just a little fallible and more human.
    The Deerslayer opens in the midst of a deep forest, the leafy surface of which “lay bathed in the brilliant light of a cloudless day in June” (p. 13). Two men are calling out who “had lost their way, and were searching in different directions for their path.” The different paths aptly suggest the different natures of Natty Bumppo—whose sobriquet is “the Deerslayer” because of his uncanny marksmanship—and the trapper Henry March who has the suggestive nicknames of Hurry Harry, Hurry Skurry, or just Hurry. The two have decided to travel together to the Lake Glimmerglass area after encountering each other on the way. Hurry Harry’s aim is to find an old crony Thomas Hutter, to pass the time with him and do some trapping. Hurry is, as always, in a hurry but does not necessarily have a clear goal in mind. Deerslayer is on a mission to meet up with his Delaware Indian friend Chingachgook, so that they can rescue the latter’s betrothed, who has been kidnapped by a band of hostile Indians of the Huron or Iroquois tribe. Hurry Harry, as his nickname suggests, not only wants everything now, but lacks altogether any larger sense of duty or morality. He has utter contempt for all Indians and considers them to be an inferior species.
    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