My brother now had possession of the hatchet and paid no more attention to him but I went to stand by a fence to watch him go.
It is because I am a white man and understand the whites better than he. I am Hawkeye the scout, “La Longue Carabine,” and as I stand by the fence la longue carabine is lying across the crook of my arm. It is represented by a stick. “I could pick him off from here, shall I do it?” I ask, speaking to my brother with whom I fight viciously every night after we have got into bed but who, during the day, is my sworn comrade in arms.
Uncas—“Le Cerf Agile”—pays no attention to my words and I rest the stick over the fence, half determined to pick off the neighbor boy but at the last withholding my fire. “He is a little pig, never to let a fellow take his hatchet. Uncas was right to snatch it out of his hand.”
As I withhold my fire and the boy goes unscathed and crying across the snow-covered field I feel very magnanimous—since at any moment I could have dropped him like a deer in flight. And then I see him go crying into his mother’s house. Uncas has, in fact, cuffed him a couple of times in the face. But was it not justified? “Dare a dirty Huron—a squaw man—dare such a one question the authority of a Delaware? Ugh!”
And now “Le Renard Subtil” has gone into his mother’s house and has blabbed on us, and I tell Uncas the news but, with the impenetrable stoicism of a true savage, he pays no attention. He is as one sitting by the council fire. Are words to be wasted on a dog of a Huron?
And now “Le Cerf Agile” has an idea. Drawing a line in the snow, he stands some fifty feet from the largest of the trees in the grove and hurls the hatchet through the air.
What a determined fellow! I am of the paleface race myself and shall always depend for my execution upon la longue carabine but Uncas is of another breed. Is there not painted on his breast a crawling tortoise? In ink I have traced it there myself from a drawing he has made.
During the short winter afternoon the hatchet will be thrown not once but a hundred, perhaps two hundred, times. It whirls through the air. The thing is to throw the hatchet so that, at the end of its flight, the blade goes, just so, firmly into the soft bark of the tree. And it must enter the bark of the tree at just a particular spot.
The matter is of infinite importance. Has not Uncas, “The Last of the Mohicans,” broad shoulders? He will later be a strong man. Now is the time to acquire infinite skill.
He has measured carefully the spot on the body of the tree where the blade of the hatchet must enter with a soft chug, deep into the yielding bark. There is a tall warrior, a hated Huron, standing by the tree and young Uncas has measured carefully so that he knows just where the top of the warrior’s head should come. An idea has come to him. He will just scalp the unsuspecting warrior with the blade of the tomahawk; and has not he, Uncas, crept for many weary miles through the forest, going without food, eating snow for his drink? A skulking Huron has dared creep into the hunting grounds of the Delawares and has learned the winter abiding place of our tribe. Dare we let him go back to his squaw-loving people, bearing such knowledge? Uncas will show him!