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

George’s War) is being waged, and he wishes, like Achilles or Odysseus, for glory in battle. He longs for the chance to prove himself in war, and not merely to display marksmanship in shooting deer and to show his prowess as a hunter. The novel’s full title is The Deerslayer: or The First War-Path. Settlements, towns, clusters, forts, and all the manifestations of civilization are not to Deerslayer’s liking, with their advances, forest clearings, comforts, “improvements,” and other signs of material progress, but he knows that civilization must, or at any rate will, advance. Moreover, he knows that it has some legitimate claims. Yet he has an innate sense of a moral order that is “higher” than society itself, partly the product of his Christian upbringing. Although not handsome, in contrast to Hurry Harry, Deerslayer’s “expression ... of guileless truth, sustained by an earnestness of purpose, and a sincerity of feeling” (pp. 14—15) endears him and renders him remarkable to all who meet him, though his penchant for telling the truth can be an irritant as well. Natty does not know (yet), though readers of The Pioneers and The Prairie know, that his moral outlook and purity of purpose will prove to be incompatible with the march of civilization, and will cause an irreparable breach between him and society.
    Although The Deerslayer is not free of authorial intrusions, Cooper for the most part lets the story tell us how, and how far, Natty’s acute moral awareness puts him at odds with the imperatives of civilization. Deerslayer’s moral stature is revealed through his relations with the other characters and through the many encounters that test his virtue. Cooper is not as explicitly didactic here as he is in some of his other novels. The novelistic action brings out the moral dimensions, and leaves the reader to grapple with the choices that arise for Deerslayer and his confreres. Although Cooper leaves no doubt about how he feels about such actions as Harry March’s random shooting of an Iroquois girl or the British soldiers’ massacre of Indian women and children, he provides no easy authorial resolutions and leaves us to wrestle with the stark moral dilemmas. The reader must decide whether the costs of “progress” are morally acceptable, and whether Natty’s virtues are practicable in the real world.
    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