The present action is the climax of the novel. The opposing forces are brought into tragic confrontation, and the final pursuit is ended. Once again, at the beginning of the chapter, Cooper sets up the quiet calm of nature to contrast with the bloody events that follow. By and large, though, Cooper devotes his skill to the exciting action that resolves the plot conflicts.
Among the surviving participants, Gamut's character shows the most development. Hawkeye is still the knowing woodsman, the frontiersman adept at pursuit and battle, but Gamut is finally taking on some of the characteristics of the frontiersman himself. Granted that he is yet the religious singer, but at least for the time being he has traded his "tooting instrument" for a weapon, his singing for fighting. When he is allowed to continue with Hawkeye's forces, his reply is that "though not given to the desire to kill, had you sent me away my spirit would have been troubled." Henceforth he is no longer bringing up the rear, and he actually fights. When he flings the rock against the head of the Huron on the mountain, the description that he thus "exposed the indignant and glowing countenance of the honest Gamut" is significant. For good or for bad, the singing master has at last come to active terms with the frontier condition.
Magua, too, is presented in fuller dimension than that of a simple villain. He is that, of course—evil, threatening, dangerous, and treacherous—but just as he formerly showed deep concern about acceptance by his people, he now demonstrates that his feeling for Cora goes beyond his original desire for revenge. When on the precipice she gives him no alternative (in light of his threat) but to kill her, he trembles "in every fibre" and is bewildered that he can only drop his arm without using the knife. What he finally would have done is not known, for the action of others interrupts his inner struggle. What is seen is that he is a man of complex and real emotions toward another human being. In his own right, he is a renowned chief early led astray by the firewater of white men. Part of the tragedy lies in the fact that the reader can see what Magua might have been under different circumstances.
The resolution of much of Cooper's thematic material remains for the final chapter of denouement, but he does give pertinent treatment of two major characters. And the fatal finality of the rapid action itself is thematic, the bodying forth of the tragic, conflicting differences bred of the frontier condition.
