The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (1826)

This is a story of the time when Britain and France were skirmishing over North America, and had zones of influence in the north-east; France further north in the Canadas under the leadership of Montcalm, and Britain centring in New England. The world it inhabits is one of seemingly endless forest, cut through with lakes (including the great lakes), hills, rivers and streams. Occasional forts dot the landscape, isolated and endangered, fought over. The first half of the book is a journey to a fort on the shores of a lake by a white scout, the originally English but long local Hawkeye, and two Mohicans - father and son Chingachgook and Uncas - as they shepherd two young women to the protection of their father at the fort. Accompanying them is a young English colonel, Heyward, who stands as protector to the women, Cora and Alice Munro, and as well a very strange character, David Gamut, a mis-shapen, religion-obsessed, completely unpractical hymn-singer and choral master, whose musical obsession governs his life. Cooper quickly establishes the mood of the piece: a sense of constant danger, readiness to fight, dappled shade and dense forest in the enormous green landscape. He also quickly develops a bloody side-angle on proceedings when the presaged danger comes to pass, scalpings and all. The women and their companions reach the fort at the same time as contesting French forces, and an extraordinary bloodbath ensues, with civilian and military bodies littered across the landscape as the superior numbers of the French and their loyal Native American tribes win out. There is a sense of veracity in this - the constant dangers of 'pioneer' life taken as read, death around every corner seen as natural. Cooper has built up by this time a very strong sense of Native American presence and customs alongside those of the whites. Our women are captured by the French-loyal tribes and carried off into the wilderness. The second half of the book then has us follow Heyward, Hawkeye, Gamut, the two Mohicans and the women's heartbroken and unseated father off into the big green again to try to rescue them. Here the colour intensifies even further as we concentrate on Native American matters more closely. Attempts are made by the white men and the Mohicans to discover and rescue Cora and Alice which involve some very odd gambits: dressing up in a bearskin as a faked medicine man for one, and impersonating 'holy fools' for another. One can feel Cooper using Gamut in some of these instances almost as a berserker - he's such an odd half-comic character that he can erupt into the story at the weirdest angles, providing a completely new line of texture, a contrast to the earthy groundedness of much of the rest of the piece. Nearing the end, it seems that Cora and Alice are both rescued, but in the last twist a renegade captor takes Cora back in a period of bargaining. The Mohicans, with Uncas now revealed as the lost king of his kind, and assisted by their allies of another tribe, chase him down. Unfortunately, but in good contrast to happy-ever-afterness, both Uncas and Cora are killed in the final fight, which nevertheless sees the end of their foes. The predominant memory of this book is the living landscape - that great green wilderness takes on a force and energy of its own, and provides a suitably unusual setting for these blood-soaked, finepoint, revealing encounters between players in the great games of power changing their world.