Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (87 page)

1
(p. 124) “they would be more likely to honor than to injure them for it”: Judith again demonstrates in this speech that she is the most clearheaded character in the novel. Most readers, by this point, have begun to like her and to feel that she is not the vain, flirtatious woman that Hurry Harry has intimated.

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(p. 125) “which is interpreted into Hist-oh-Hist”: I refer to her throughout as Hist.

3
(p. 126) “something might turn up that would lead to our getting the maiden off”: Here, in Deerslayer’s account, we have the more benign suggestion that the Mingos, or Iroquois, were not engaged in a French-inspired raid but were merely intending “to hunt and forage through this region for a month or two.” Under this view, they apparently were given the opportunity by chance to abduct Hist through the connivance of Briarthorn, Chingachgook’s rival within his own tribe. In any event, if the rival indeed had some scheme of his own, he was now out in the cold because the Mingos were not about to surrender their prize to him.

4
(p. 126) “have one of my own on my hands afore that is settled”: Deerslayer’s innocence is puzzling. It is difficult to imagine a youth of twenty to twenty-two who has not had strong sexual attractions, even if he were still a virgin. He seems not to have thought about sex or love at all. It is even more puzzling that a man who has grown up with Indians as he has, and who has so few prejudices in other respects, would share the common taboo against Indian women (and we must also blame Cooper or the narrator, if we assume the narrator is a persona different from the author). Other novels of the 1820s, including Lydia Child’s Hobomok and Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, featured interracial marriages, though in these cases it was white women who married Indian men after having been abducted by Indians.

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(p. 130) The distance between the castle and the rock was a little more than two leagues: A league can be any of various units of distance from 2.4 to 4.6 statute miles (or 3.9 to 7.4 kilometers). Considering that the castle is located in the northern part of the lake and the Council Rock in the southern near the mouth of the river, and that the lake is some 7 miles long, we can take a middle range and estimate that they had to travel between 6 and 7 miles. The Council Rock today looks much as it must have looked to Cooper, worn smooth by the lapping of the water over many centuries, though no longer under overhanging tree branches.

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(p. 135) giants of the forest ... very many inclined so far as to steep their lower branches in the water: Today, though the vegetation has thinned and the giant trees are missing, even the casual observer of the banks of Lake Otsego can readily recognize Cooper’s description. The banks are so steep in many places that traveling by boat is faster than traveling on foot near the shore.

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(p. 136) height of this rock could scarcely equal six feet: Today, the rocks extend only a foot or two out of the water. But I observed them one September after a very heavy rain. A tall pine no longer overhangs the rock.

3
(p. 137) Chingachgook was yet young on a warpath: Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo are roughly the same age.

4
(p. 145) “old Tamenund”: He is the wise old Delaware (Mohican) chief whose eloquent words end The Last of the Mohicans. Tamenund—or Tammany or Tamanen, as he was sometimes called—was a legendary seventeenth-century chief renowned for his ability to achieve harmony between Native American and white-settler cultures. The Tammany Society, a powerful political organization operating in New York City in the nineteenth century, was originally formed and named after him because of his symbolic appeal in promoting the American cultural “melting pot.” Tammany Hall, the Society headquarters, in the end became a symbol of urban political corruption.

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(p. 153) at the distance of near a league from the outlet: This would appear to be Three Mile Point.

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(p. 170) a hostile blow before it finally retired: This paragraph does not entirely explain the Iroquois’s presence in the area. Are they, in fact, on a war footing once they get word of the outbreak of hostilities? If not, why did they wear war paint, as Deerslayer asks in chapter V?

2
(p. 181) “Why, then, does the paleface use them? ... My name is Rivenoak”: This discussion shows how Cooper, though devout, was uncomfortable with what he saw as the hypocrisy and empty rituals of much of organized religion. Rivenoak is the Indian who jumps onto the deck of the ark in chapter IV and is pushed overboard by Judith. He is a highly intelligent and wily adversary for Deerslayer.

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(p. 187) hue scarcely less red than that of his Mohican companion: The “Mohicans” and the “Delawares” are tribes of the same nation and are essentially identical, as is made clear in the scene in The Last of the Mohicans where Natty, Chingachgook, and his son Uncas rally a village of friendly Delawares to defeat a tribe of French-allied Iroquois, led by the villainous Magua. At times in The Pioneers Cooper interchanges the Mohegans and the Mohicans, two different tribes. The Mohegans were a Connecticut tribe, while the Mohicans came from the Hudson River Valley.

2
(p. 188) “the difference atwixt that which is ra’al and that which is seeming”: Sometimes Deerslayer’s colloquial speech is difficult for the modern reader to disentangle. Cooper had a continuing problem with his compositors, who regularly sought to render Deerslayer’s English into a more standard format. Cooper became enraged at this presumption and corrected his proofs back to Natty’s mangling of grammar and pronunciation. Cooper strongly believed that the vernacular usages made his Leatherstocking novels more “realistic” and authentic, just as he insisted on verisimilitude in the details of such strange creations as the ark and the castle.

3
(p. 199) “They’ll give up old Hutter and Harry, and Hetty too, at such a spectacle!”: This idea apparently germinates in Judith’s mind, and forms the basis for her later attempt to rescue Deerslayer from the Iroquois.

1
(p. 206) “owner shall fire his piece at a deer ... he makes it sartain death to a child, or a brother, or a fr‘ind!”: In addition to considering Cooper an early advocate of environmental protection and racial equality, we might sign him on to the cause of handgun control as well.

2
(p. 212) some knowledge of the symptoms of the master passion: It is a puzzle how Deerslayer, who is otherwise acute and sensitive, can be quite as naive as he is and obtuse about Judith’s feelings toward him.

3
(p. 217) the boy rowed slowly .. that lay less than half a mile distant: Muskrat Castle is located slightly closer to the western than to the eastern shore of the lake. The Indian boy probably paddled his raft due west or slightly southwest, landing considerably north of the Indian encampment.

1
(p. 233) “to own he can’t read; but such is my case, Judith”: Why didn’t Deerslayer’s missionary foster parents teach him to read, since Chingachgook has already said that the missionaries tried to teach him some printing? This seems to be a case of singular neglect. We may surmise that this is a case of Cooper having boxed himself in by virtue of having described Natty as unable to read or write in previous Leatherstocking novels.

1
(p. 247) were encamped for the night abreast of the castle ... communications with Hurry: The warriors, or some portion of them, have thus moved considerably to the north. Since many huts were seen at the previous encampment and could not be quickly moved, Hurry and Hutter infer that their previous assessment is true this time. The narrator here, however, is summarizing the thought process of these two, not stating what he—the omniscient author—knows to be the case.

1
(p. 262) had been delayed by their preparations, which included lodging as well as food: It is late by now. We have already seen Hutter, Harry, and Chingachgook visit the vacated camp. Earlier in the evening, at sunset, Hutter and Harry were exchanged for the chess pieces, and Natty and his companions departed from the castle. The Indians also had a great deal of logistical work to do, since they had to construct new huts after abandoning the old site. Of the Leatherstocking novels, The Deerslayer has the fewest major characters and is the most compressed in time scale—the entire action occurs over less than a week (except for what happens in the brief epilogue in chapter XXXII)—and yet it is the longest.

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.

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(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.

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(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.

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(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.

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(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.

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(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 formidable fighter. They also delay their return to Canada. Rivenoak possibly figures that he will win Deerslayer over, and with Deerslayer’s cooperation he can negotiate a surrender of some sort without having to fight.

2
(p. 366) “the Sarpent and his wife will be safe, and that is some happiness, in any case”: Natty is not thinking straight. How will the Sarpent and Hist be safe? Hist has already warned him that no deals can be safely made with the Iroquois. Judith certainly feels that the present situation is another case of Natty’s “stubborn uprightness,” as she has termed it earlier, but she knows she cannot push him further now. The proposal from Rivenoak, when it is presented in chapter XXIII, will be unacceptable.

1
(p. 382) “detarmined afore tomorrow’s sun has set”: Deerslayer expects that he will be dead by the end of the next day. It is currently the fourth night since Hurry Harry and Deerslayer arrived, and tomorrow will be the fifth day, when events will culminate. Harry certainly has few redeeming characteristics, but Cooper and the novel’s characters do not give much of a break to a man who risks encounters with Iroquois scouts to bring relief to his friends. Deerslayer’s strictures to lead the troops back are a little gratuitous since Harry has already announced his intention of doing just that. Cooper endowed even Floating Tom with a few generous feelings; for Hurry Harry, he has none. Cooper has Harry declare the wish that he had scalped the whole Iroquois camp, and Harry has him blame Deerslayer’s refusal to join in the initial scalping expedition for Deerslayer’s current fix.