The Deerslayer

The scout is young here, on his first war-path in the Otsego country, and the argument with the Hurons is over a girl, a bag of ivory chessmen and whether a man may take a scalp. Cooper wrote it last of the five Leatherstocking tales and set it first in time. The gauntlet run and the trial by fire are set pieces he had been rehearsing for twenty years. Twenty-five plates, among them Kensett's Lake George and Munch's scene from the Ekely forest, follow the woodland water and winter light of the frontier.