The Deerslayer

"When about a hundred yards from the shore, Deerslayer rose in the canoe, gave three or four vigorous strokes with the paddle, sufficient of themselves to impel the bark to land, and then quickly laying aside the instrument of labor, he seized that of war. He was in the very act of raising the rifle, when a sharp report was followed by the buzz of a bullet that passed so near his body as to cause him involuntarily to start. The next instant Deerslayer staggered, and fell his whole length in the bottom of the canoe." And thus, young Natty (Deerslayer) begins his initiation into a manhood spent in the wilderness of the American frontier. The last of the famed Leatherstocking Tales to be penned by James Fenimore Cooper, yet the first in the chronology of the life of one of America's most treasured heroes, Natty Bumpo, "The Deerslayer; or The First Warpath" is Cooper's masterpiece, which D.H. Lawrence called "the lovliest and best" of the Leatherstocking Tales.