Cooper's fresh and original treatment in this section of the story leads to three variations—one in plot, one in motif, one in theme, and all involving Uncas directly or indirectly. In this second chase sequence, pursuit has again led to a capture, but the difference is that now one of the pursuers has been made captive. Through the prisoner certain Indian customs are shown in the glare of grotesquerie, part of the motif of unreality that involves disguise, which shows its involvement here in the dissembling Heyward's tripping the Huron. Other Indian customs are the mocking of the prisoner, the scalps, the "death-halloo," and particularly the dealing with the coward. The death of the young Huron is reserved for the hands of the father who brought him into being, but it is traditionally an inexorable result. Thematically it presents a third father-child relationship and the end of a progenitive line. As Uncas is the last offspring of the Mohicans, the young Huron is the last male offspring of his family, but the difference is great. Whereas the Huron family's end comes from personal failure, the Mohicans' will come because men at large are responsible for there being only one potential Mohican father and no possible Mohican mother. The third father-child relationship is that of Munro and his daughters, and though Cooper makes no real point of it, it is more than obvious that, no matter what happens to the girls, the name of Munro ends with them. The end of a line is a very important theme in the overall purpose of the book, and in these two chapters Cooper adroitly integrates it with a major motif and the structural technique of the chase.
