Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by James Fenimore Cooper Read Free Book Online

Deerslayer also hopes one of the Indians will miss and finish him off, getting the whole thing over with once and for all.
    As the bullets are thudding into the tree centimeters from his head, an apparition suddenly appears on the scene that astounds everybody It is Judith, clad in the magnificent red gown she found at the bottom of Thomas Hutter’s trunk; she is pretending to be an emissary of the Queen and calling on the Indians to release Deerslayer. Her speech is a trifle vague as to her credentials, for she doesn’t want to strain the chief ’s credulity, nor does she want to depart too radically from the truth and provoke Deerslayer to disavow her. She knows full well his dislike of lying. The chief smells a rat in the whole business and is not about to be conned again. He has apparently had some second thoughts about the probity of his earlier release of hostages in exchange for two chess pieces. Rivenoak calls on Hetty, who is sitting with the other woman onlookers, and invites her opinion, knowing that she is guileless enough to tell the truth. Hetty ingenuously identifies Judith as her sister, and—to boot—botches a scheme to slip a knife into Deerslayer’s hands behind the tree trunk to which he is tied. Deerslayer is strangely cold to Judith’s gallant ef fort to save him. She has risked her life to save his neck (and scalp), has shown extraordinary courage and daring, and she doesn’t even get a kind thought from him. He wishes she hadn’t tried the caper in the first place, seeing it perhaps as a display of her earlier vanity and desire to be at the center of attention. In any event, it was ill-conceived because it risked the chief ’s ire by a scheme that would insult his intelligence. The chief has had enough by now: He orders his warriors to get on with the torture, and he ponders taking Judith back with him to the north. At this point, first Chingachgook and then the British arrive. There is a final mystery that the text does not explicitly resolve: How far does Natty participate in the final battle? He is active in the fighting at first, shooting two Indians, but could not have participated in the massacre of women and children. Could he have somehow prevented it? Cooper leaves us in the dark on this point.
    Natty and Judith have a final poignant encounter a day later in a canoe after they have buried Hetty next to her mother in the lake. Judith asks Deerslayer to stop his paddling and spend a few moments with her apart from the other canoes. Here, in a scene that has not received the critical attention it deserves, Judith pours out her soul to Deerslayer. It is clear how much she has grown as a person; her tender affection and love for Deerslayer are obvious; her anxiety but yet her courage in facing the future are unmistakable. At first Deerslayer plays dumb, hoping to get by without directly answering her. She is at last forced to make a direct appeal, a straight-out proposal of marriage to him. He rebuffs her. Then, painfully, she asks him if it is something Hurry Harry has said about her that has poisoned his attitude toward her. Deerslayer is at his most eloquent; for once, he is silent. He lets the small lie stand, knowing it will hurt her less than the full truth: He doesn’t love her, doesn’t respect her enough, and doesn’t want to live out his life with her. Nor does he trust her steadfastness, and he sees that her nature is at bottom to want the spotlight or at least the comforts of the settlement and the other good things of civilized life that he cannot give her. They cannot live a life on the lake, in the castle; it won’t work. Perhaps he doesn’t want to tell her the deeper truth: that he knows he has been condemned by his (novelistic) creator to live out his life alone as the archetypical rootless American, without ever experiencing love. He will be an isolate—cast out by society, his values trampled upon—and will die on the barren plains, his bones bleaching in the