It is a wild romance, like a river with tributaries and rapids shooting from all directions. Semi-comedic episodes intermingle with terrifying darkness, history vies with romance, the plot lurches, drags, and sprints until one peak among many, like one of the Adirondacks in which so much of the book is set, looms in stillness above the rest. Just when it seems as though the multitudinous strands of symbolism in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) cannot possibly be tied together in time for the finale, a silence falls over the book as Cora Munro, the book’s heroine, pleads desperately to Tamenund, the Lenape chief, in a final attempt to spare herself and her sister from being handed over to the Huron tribe. The moment is a study in character and symbolic depth…