|
THE DEERSLAYER
THE DEERSLAYER JAMES FENIMORE COOPER Chapter I.
"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods
There is a rapture on the lonely shore.
There is society where none intrudes
By the deep sea and music in its roar:
I love not man the less but nature more
From these our interviews in which I steal
From all I may be or have been before
To mingle with the universe and feel
What I can ne'er express yet cannot all conceal"
Childe Harold.
On the human imagination events produce the effects of time. Thus
he who has travelled far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has
lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents
soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity. In no other way can
we account for the venerable air that is already gathering around
American annals. When the mind reverts to the earliest days of
colonial history the period seems remote and obscure the thousand
changes that thicken along the links of recollections throwing
back the origin of the nation to a day so distant as seemingly to
reach the mists of time; and yet four lives of ordinary duration
would suffice to transmit from mouth to mouth in the form of
tradition all that civilized man has achieved within the limits
of the republic. Although New York alone possesses a population
materially exceeding that of either of the four smallest kingdoms
of Europe or materially exceeding that of the entire Swiss
Confederation it is little more than two centuries since the Dutch
commenced their settlement rescuing the region from the savage
state. Thus what seems venerable by an accumulation of changes
is reduced to familiarity when we come seriously to consider it
solely in connection with time.
This glance into the perspective of the past will prepare the reader
to look at the pictures we are about to sketch with less surprise
than he might otherwise feel; and a few additional explanations may
carry him back in imagination to the precise condition of society
that we desire to delineate. It is matter of history that the
settlements on the eastern shores of the Hudson such as Claverack
Kinderhook and even Poughkeepsie were not regarded as safe from
Indian incursions a century since; and there is still standing on
the banks of the same river and within musket-shot of the wharves
of Albany a residence of a younger branch of the Van Rensselaers
that has loopholes constructed for defence against the same crafty
enemy although it dates from a period scarcely so distant. Other
similar memorials of the infancy of the country are to be found
scattered through what is now deemed the very centre of American
civilization affording the plainest proofs that all we possess of
security from invasion and hostile violence is the growth of but
little more than the time that is frequently fulfilled by a single
human life.
The incidents of this tale occurred between the years 1740 and 1745
when the settled portions of the colony of New York were confined
to the four Atlantic counties a narrow belt of country on each
side of the Hudson extending from its mouth to the falls near its
head and to a few advanced "neighborhoods" on the Mohawk and the
Schoharie. Broad belts of the virgin wilderness not only reached the
shores of the first river but they even crossed it stretching away
into New England and affording forest covers to the noiseless moccasin
of the native warrior as he trod the secret and bloody war-path.
A bird's-eye view of the whole region east of the Mississippi
must then have offered one vast expanse of woods relieved by a
comparatively narrow fringe of cultivation along the sea dotted
by the glittering surfaces of lakes and intersected by the waving
lines of river. In such a vast picture of solemn solitude the
district of country we design to paint sinks into insignificance
though we feel encouraged to proceed by the conviction that with
slight and immaterial distinctions he who succeeds in giving an
accurate idea of any portion of this wild region must necessarily
convey a tolerably correct notion of the whole.
Whatever may be the changes produced by man the eternal round of
the seasons is unbroken. Summer and winter seed-time and harvest
return in their stated order with a sublime precision affording
to man one of the noblest of all the occasions he enjoys of proving
the high powers of his far-reaching mind in compassing the laws
that control their exact uniformity and in calculating their
never-ending revolutions.
Centuries of summer suns had warmed the tops of the same noble oaks
and pines sending their heats even to the tenacious roots when
voices were heard calling to each other in the depths of a forest
of which the leafy surface lay bathed in the brilliant light of a
cloudless day in June while the trunks of the trees rose in gloomy
grandeur in the shades beneath. The calls were in different tones
evidently proceeding from two men who had lost their way and
were searching in different directions for their path. At length
a shout proclaimed success and presently a man of gigantic mould
broke out of the tangled labyrinth of a small swamp emerging into
an opening that appeared to have been formed partly by the ravages
of the wind and partly by those of fire. This little area which
afforded a good view of the sky although it was pretty well filled
with dead trees lay on the side of one of the high hills or low
mountains into which nearly the whole surface of the adjacent
country was broken.
"Here is room to breathe in!" exclaimed the liberated forester
as soon as he found himself under a clear sky shaking his huge
frame like a mastiff that has just escaped from a snowbank. "Hurrah!
Deerslayer; here is daylight at last and yonder is the lake."
These words were scarcely uttered when the second forester dashed
aside the bushes of the swamp and appeared in the area. After
making a hurried adjustment of his arms and disordered dress he
joined his companion who had already begun his disposition for a
halt.
"Do you know this spot!" demanded the one called Deerslayer"
or do you shout at the sight of the sun?"
"Both lad both; I know the spot and am not sorry to see
so useful a fri'nd as the sun. Now we have got the p'ints of the
compass in our minds once more and 't will be our own faults if
...
|
