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

it. He argues vociferously against white men engaging in scalp taking and refuses to have anything to do with the scheme:
    “My gifts are not scalpers’ gifts, but such as belong to my religion and color. I’ll stand by you, old man, in the ark or in the castle, the canoe or the woods, but I’ll not unhumanize my natur’ by falling into ways that God intended for another race” (p. 75).
    Natty’s reasoning is interesting. It would be a mistake to regard him as a modern human rights advocate. He does not regard scalping as wrong under all circumstances for all peoples. He has the notion of “gifts” to which he refers at numerous points in the novel. There are white “gifts” and Indian “gifts” as well as male and female “gifts.” While it is wrong for whites to scalp their enemies, it is not wrong for Indians to take the scalps of warriors they have defeated in honorable battle, because it accords with the Indian desire to not have to go alone into the next world. It is even all right for Indians to take white scalps, provided only that the victim is dead before the scalp is removed.
    Deerslayer understands and accepts different values, it seems, and is thus an ideal candidate for reconciling the clash of norms that inevitably accompanies the settling of the American wilderness by diverse groups of white settlers, colonial authorities, and indigenous natives. However, the notion of the gift, as frequently invoked by Deerslayer, is ambiguous. Gifts evidently are partly rooted in nature, in human nature as well as in the natural order. One is entitled to do what one’s nature allows. But the gift is also connected to the social order, and the social orders of the white and of the red man may conflict. The various social hierarchies within and among the ranks of the white man and within and among the numerous Indian tribes are also noteworthy. There is no way to reconcile or to weigh the merits of the respective groups other than by the standard of power.
    The requirements of Nature and of Civilization are evidently at odds, but Cooper has no way of resolving their respective claims. He seems simultaneously to affirm and to condemn the conquest of the American wilderness by transplanted Europeans. It is wrong for civilization to encroach too palpably upon the beauty and tranquility of nature, but white settlers must be free to build towns and to clear the forests. Natty, in The Deerslayer, has a feeling that there is a natural fitness of things, an order both in nature and in the social world that can be grasped and can help guide our actions. The idea is summed up well in a remark to Judith Hutter when they are in a canoe and she hears a fish jump or something stir in the water:
    “Sartainly something did move the water, oncommon like; it must have been a fish. Them creatur’s prey upon each other like men and animals on the land; one has leaped into the air, and fallen back hard into his own element. ‘Tis of little use, Judith, for any to strive to get out of their elements, since it’s natur’ to stay in ’em; and natur’ will have its way” (p. 149).
    Natty’s sense of the fitness of things rubs off on Judith and helps to shape her evolution from a vain young woman enamored with glitz and show to a serious and appealing figure. Indeed, Judith is perhaps Cooper’s most appealing female character; only Cora, in The Last of the Mohicans, has comparable vitality. We like Judith better as the novel progresses, and this capacity for growth makes her ultimate fate the more poignant. Tom Hutter’s other daughter, Hetty, is strikingly different from Judith. Judith is beautiful, dark-haired, and intelligent, while Hetty is a feeble-minded blond with plain good looks. But Hetty is a saintly figure; her belongings on a peg in the castle in chapter II evoke in Deerslayer a warm, repressed memory of his long dead mother. While Deerslayer appears in some ways as guileless and saintly as Hetty, there is a