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crucial difference: He can function in the world, in the woods if not in society, while she is as a child, helpless and dependent on others. Natty, furthermore, will prove himself as a warrior, a man who thrives on fighting. Hetty knows the Bible well, quotes from it freely and often, and weaves her way through the narrative delivering uncomfortable truths at awkward moments until she falls victim to a stray bullet in the climactic battle at the novel’s end.
    Could Natty Bumppo have turned out to be something different, if only events had gone differently? No, neither history nor fiction allows for “might-have-beens.” Natty’s fate has been predetermined in the other Leatherstocking novels. However, in The Deerslayer the larger events seem more hazy, the personalities more in the foreground, the outcomes more contingent, and the play of circumstance and human will more the decisive factors. Cooper has achieved his greatest literary effects in this last of the series, and we can now with profit revisit the other stories in light of what we know of Deerslayer’s youth.
    Natty’s notions of “elements” and the fitness of things do not, unfortunately, resolve fundamental issues for himself or for Judith. Natty was born of white parents but was raised by missionaries and spent much of his youth with the Delaware Indians. He may speak Indian dialects better than he does English (at least we can wonder whether he mangles the syntax and mispronounces words as frequently as he does in English). He works as a kind of contractor for the military Where, then, does he fit in the social pecking order? Judith, who has suffered from being considered the daughter of the reclusive ex-pirate Tom Hutter, but who turns out to be the illegitimate child of a senior British officer and an educated white woman, belongs by rights above the rank that society has assigned her. Her intelligence, beauty, and courage alone should have earned her a better fate, but as it is she is only a hanger-on around the military base and a cast-off lover of a British officer.
    But to return to the action of The Deerslayer, we find that Natty, although he has refused to participate in Hutter’s and March’s scalping scheme, nonetheless agrees to protect Judith and Hetty during the men’s absence. He becomes indirectly complicit in the odious plan when he agrees to collect the canoes that Hutter has hidden around the lake in order to keep them out of the hands of the Indians. Deerslayer realizes that in doing this he is involved indirectly in this repellent plan; he is not a fool. This self-consciousness on his part and Judith’s self-awareness help bring them to life as characters.
    In contrast, Hurry Harry does not learn anything about himself and does not change. He remains boorish, graceless, and vulgar. Similarly, old Tom Hutter remains the reclusive buccaneer to the end, but is less boastful than Harry and mercifully spares us any effort at self justification. His is purely an amoral survival ethic. When the Indians finally scalp him without the courtesy of killing him first, he does not appear particularly surprised and proceeds to die with a certain degree of courage and perhaps even a touch of dignity Before dying, he tells Judith that he is not her real father, directing her to the trunk he has kept locked in the castle in an act that may be intended as malice, or atonement of some sort, or merely a matter-of-fact deathbed confession. Old Tom and Harry, in their scheme to attack the Indian women and children, are not men “likely to stick at trifles in matters connected with the right of the aborigines, since it is one of the consequences of aggression that it hardens the conscience, as the only means of quieting it” (p. 78).
    The wily Iroquois Rivenoak is the principal foe on the Indian side. Although he seems at times almost a mirror image of a rapacious white settler bent on his own version of plunder, he is capable of growth and