""Pale-face," says the Huron chief to Deerslayer, "my people are happy in having captured you -- a man, and not a skulking fox. We now know you, and we shall treat you like a brave. If you have slain one of our warriors, and helped to kill others, you have a life of your own ready to give away in return. Some of my young men thought that the blood of a pale-face was too thin -- that it would refuse to run under the Huron knife. You will show them it is not so. It is a pleasure to make such a prisoner!"" The settled portions of the colony of New York are scant and narrow -- no more than thin stretches of land washed by the waves of the Atlantic, and belts of country to each side of the colony's main waterway, extending up to the falls near its head. Virgin wilderness still stretches away into New England -- giving leafy cover to the noiseless moccasin of the warrior treading the secret and bloody warpath. These are the early 1740s . . . and into these lake-spotted wilds strides a tall, gaunt hunter in foxskin cap and buckskin leggings -- the embodiment of the American pioneering spirit, and hero of one of James Fenimore Cooper's greatest novels, "The Deerslayer."