"spirits of crows, dancing"

In this last chapter, the narrator describes Ada and Inman as they "composed a plan for themselves," for what to do now they are reunited.  Notice the suggestion of music in the verb "composed."  I  don't say "what to do now that Inman is home," because the truth is Inman is not home, he is not back at Black Cove. He is in an abandoned Indian village near Cold Mountain.

The narrator says "there were but three courses to pick from":  Inman could 1) return to the army and hope for an early end to the war, 2) stay hidden in the mountains, or 3) cross the mountains north and put himself in the hands of the Federals, who "would make him sign his name to their oath of allegiance, but then he could wait out the fighting and come home."  These "bitter three," the narrator explains, "were all the choices the war allowed."

But there's a fourth choice --- Inman could die a "hero's death." And that's the death Frazier gives him. I would also argue that's the option Inman really wanted.  Let me quote for John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale":

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

What strikes me about Frazier's treatment of Inman's death is how much he softens it.  When Inman is shot by the "boy," all the narrator says is "Inman suddenly lay on the ground."  Soon Ada is by Inman's side, and he drifts "in and out" of a "bright dream of a home." Not his home, but an idealized dream of a home. The dream is suffused with nature:

It [his dream home] had a cold water spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plants blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October . . . Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and great number of crows, or at least the spirit of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. 

Frazier ends the description by saying "There was something he [Inman] wanted to say."  But we don't know what he wanted to say, or even if he was able to say it.  Instead, Frazier shifts the point of view to "an observer situated up on the brow of the ridge," a sudden shift from inside Inman's dreaming consciousness to a distance consciousness from the "outside" world. This is how we are encouraged to view Inman's death, as a "still, distant tableau in the winter woods."

A wooded glade, secluded from the generality of mankind. A pair of lovers. The man reclined with his head in the woman's lap. She, looking down into his eyes, smoothing back the hair from his brow. He, reaching an arm awkwardly around to hold her at the soft part of her lip. Both touching each other with great intimacy. A scene of such quiet and peace that the observer on the ridge could avouch to it later in such a way as might lead those with glad temperaments to imagine some conceivable history where long decades of happy union stretched before the two on the ground. 

It takes a lot of qualifications, romantic qualifications, to turn this into a happy scene.  The observer must be at some distance from the couple (on the ridge) and he or she must have a "glad" temperament.  Even then, the story of "long decades of happy union" is only a "conceivable history," not a real one.

This is exactly the opposite of what Frazier did in the previous chapter, when Ada and Inman were truly secure in the cabin, but the narrator draws back to remind us of what the original Indians had suffered.

A short epilogue is attached to the novel, and I've read it.  But I'll save my comments for later. We need to spend time at this "first" ending of the novel, Inman's ending, before we go on to Ada's ending.