The Deerslayer

• Complete text of the Household Edition (Houghton, Mifflin; copyright 1876)
• Two hardcover parts: Chapters I–XVI and Chapters XVII–XXXII
• Eighteen plates reconstructed for this edition, nine in each part
• Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Introduction and her Notes A–P
• Publisher’s foreword, author portrait and a glossary in each part

There was a time before the roads.

Before the surveyor’s chain crossed the valley, before the axe had opened the first clearing, before the courthouse, the mill, the village street and the boundary stone had imposed their geometry upon the continent, there stood the forest.

And through that forest walked men who belonged wholly neither to settlement nor to wilderness.

Of them, one endured.

His name was Natty Bumppo.

There is a peculiar solemnity in approaching the beginning of a legend after already knowing its end.

The Deerslayer was the last of the five Leatherstocking novels Cooper wrote, yet it stands first in the life of Natty Bumppo. The aged creator returned to the youth of the man whom he had first imagined in old age and placed him once more beside the waters of Otsego Lake.

Nothing has yet become inevitable.

The settlement is distant.

The great inland forest remains sovereign.

Natty has skill but not fame, principles but not legend, a rifle but not yet the burden of all the deaths that will follow.

The title itself marks initiation.

Deerslayer is a hunter’s name.

Not yet a warrior’s.

AMBER SERIES reading edition: the text of the Household Edition of Houghton, Mifflin (copyright 1876), in two hardcover parts, with eighteen plates reconstructed for this edition.