FIVE-MILE POINT]

In the open area of Five-Mile Point, after his recapture, Deerslayer was
bound to a tree, and became a target for the hairbreadth marksmanship of
Huron tomahawks, preliminary to being put to torture.

North of this spot, and along the shore, Hutter's Point is of interest
to the reader of the _Leather-Stocking Tales_, for here is the path by
which Deerslayer reached the lake at the beginning of his romantic
history, and gained his first view of the Glimmerglass. In the second
chapter of the _Deerslayer_, Cooper's famous description of the lake as
it was when the first white man came, based upon his own recollection of
it when nine-tenths of its shores were in virgin forest, was conceived
from the angle of Hutter's Point.

[Illustration: _M. Antoinette Abrams_

MOHICAN CANYON]

Not far from the northern end of the lake a faint discoloration of the
water, with a few reeds projecting above the surface, reveals the
location of the so-called "sunken island," where the waters of the lake
shoal from a great depth, and offer the site upon which, at the southern
end of the shoal, Cooper's imagination built the "Muskrat Castle" of Tom
Hutter, at which the terrific struggle with the Indians occurred when
Hutter was killed. At the northern end of the sunken island was the
watery grave in which the mother of Judith and Hetty lay, and which
afterward became the grave of Hutter, and finally of Hetty herself.[127]

Across the lake, on its eastern shore, south of Hyde Bay, is Gravelly
Point, to which Hutter's lost canoe drifted, and where Deerslayer killed
his first Indian. Farther south is Point Judith, now marked by
Kingfisher Tower, where Deerslayer, returning to the Glimmerglass
fifteen years after the events described in the story, found the
stranded wreck of the ark, and saw fluttering from a log a ribbon that
had been worn by the lovely Judith Hutter. Here "he tore away the ribbon
and knotted it to the stock of Killdeer, which had been the gift of the
girl herself."

Toward the foot of the lake the eastern hills and shore belong to scenes
of Leather-Stocking's elder days, as described in _The Pioneers_. North
of Lakewood Cemetery a climb up the precipitous mountainside leads to
Natty Bumppo's Cave, which, with some poetic license in his treatment
of its dimensions, the novelist employs as a setting for the final
climax of his story. To the platform of rock over the cave, as a refuge
from the forest fire,