The five novels in The Leatherstocking Tales (collected in two Library of America volumes), Cooper's great saga of the American wilderness, form a pageant of the American frontier. Cooper's hero, Natty Bumppo, is forced ever farther into the heart of the continent by the advance of civilization that he inadvertently serves as advance scout, missionary, and critic. 
Leatherstocking first appears in The Pioneers (1823),...

Ten-year-old Walking Turtle, of the Lenni-Lenape tribe, is close to his younger cousin, Little Talk, who has difficulty walking, and worries about what will become of him when the time comes for Walking Turtle to leave his childhood friends to begin training at warrior school.