Narragansett pacers

The Narragansett pacers are the horses accompanying the traveling party, and later become essential to both Magua’s escape with the Munro sisters and the pursuit that follows. Their tracks and condition help the pursuers reconstruct the route, while Hawkeye’s handling of a canoe shows how animal movement and terrain can be turned into tools of deception.

Role in the Captures and Pursuit

After Magua reaches the horses, he places Alice on one and signals Cora to mount the other. Cora asks to have her sister with her, and Magua puts Alice beside her on the same animal before leading them farther into the forest. David Gamut follows on the horse they leave behind. The pacers thus carry the sisters away from the scene of the fighting and give their pursuers a concrete trail to follow.

The horses’ tracks are later distinguishable from the trail of the people. Hawkeye and his companions find evidence that the party has mounted, with the animals having been tied to a sapling while they waited. The tracks point north toward Canada, clarifying the route Magua has taken. At a later stop, the pursuers find the pacers’ traces alongside signs of a camp, including extinguished fires and remains from a deer; the nearby resting place intensifies Heyward’s concern for the sisters.

Condition and Information in the Trail

Uncas eventually returns leading two fillies. Their saddles are broken and their housings soiled, suggesting that they have been left to run freely for several days. Hawkeye interprets their condition and the absence of signs that the women had needed to ride as evidence that Magua was not being pressed by pursuers and had not taken the sisters’ lives. The horses’ condition therefore informs a practical judgment about the captives’ situation, even as the party remains in enemy territory.

Use in Concealment and Movement

Elsewhere in the pursuit, a canoe is mistaken for a bird at a distance and identified as a vessel used by pursuing warriors. Hawkeye warns that the lake offers little cover and expects the pursuers to take up the trail after dark. His party carries the canoe into the woods, makes an obvious trail, crosses a stream, then retraces its steps backward over bare rock and follows the brook to the lake. They relaunch the canoe under cover of a low point and overhanging bushes, later hiding it beneath brush before continuing on foot. The episode places the pacers’ trail within a wider pattern of reading and manipulating signs: animals, tracks, water, and terrain all shape the pursuit.

Narrative Significance

The pacers are not individualized as characters; their narrative importance lies in what their movements reveal and enable. They make rapid travel possible, but their tracks also expose the party’s direction. Their later condition becomes evidence from which Hawkeye infers the sisters’ likely treatment, while the broader chase contrasts the limitations of open water with the concealment offered by streams, woods, and rock. Through these practical details, the horses help make the wilderness legible as both a route and a record of recent movement.