Sketchbook

By John Skow

Barry Lopez is best known for two wonderfully instructive non-fiction books that explore the troubled boundaries between civilization and nature, Of Wolves and Men and Arctic Dreams. Their substance is scholarly and reflective (he won the 1986 National Book Award for Dreams), but it is their tone -- highly colored, moody, elegiac -- that speaks unforgettably to de-natured urbanites. And, it could be added, that causes some wildlife biologists to roll their eyes.

The title of his brief new work, Field Notes (Knopf; 159 pages; $20), evokes science, but what Lopez offers instead are a dozen fictional sketches from his staked-out territory at the edge of the natural world. The stories are slight, and the term note suggests sketchbook impressions, perhaps, for canvases that might someday be painted. Thus slyly discounted by their author, these spare narrations carry surprising weight. One story, Teal Creek, is nothing more than a teenager's recollection of coming instinctively to respect a rural hermit's solitude. Although Lopez is known for wavering dangerously close to poetic prose, here he leaves all the right things unsaid, and the silence resonates.

The prize of the collection is a haunting story called The Runner, in which an ordinary man tries earnestly to bridge the spiritual distance between himself and his long-absent sister, legendary in Arizona for making all but impossible runs over ancient, barely visible Anasazi trails in the Grand Canyon. Her descents are a kind of Zen archery, only partly physical. Lopez, who's far too shrewd to bring the fey sister onstage, leaves the reader with a mysterious image: the woman, running on her toes like a deer, glimpsed by rafting vacationers, and then, downriver beyond impassible rock walls, glimpsed again.

Warning: the author's empurpled introduction, which contains such glop as "Hope has become a bird's feather, glissading from the evening sky," is unrepresentative and should be ignored.