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MY LIFE AS A DOG By Reidar Jonsson Farrar, Strauss & Giroux $17.95 Fiction
The snowflakes had a hypnotic effect on me. I was getting more and more drowsy, but I needed to keep my eyes open. What if I missed my station and got off at the wrong one, rushed out into the white arctic tundra, totally dazed, only to be met by wolves who were ready to tear me to pieces! Now, that would be unforgivable and unworthy of a true Trapper. A Trapper must never make mistakes. One single mistake in the art of survival, like failing to light a fire or looking after one's dogs properly, and you pay with your life.
OF CHILES, CACTI, AND FIGHTING COCKS: Notes on the American West By Frederick Turner North Point Press, $19.95 Nonfiction
Growing up east of the Mississippi in the years before Sputnik, we had the West all around us. I don't mean the physical, corporeal West, nor do I even mean the ''historical West,'' if by that we understand the West of brute fact. I mean the West of the imagination. The earliest popular songs I remember were those about the West. My older brother and I sang along to ''Don't Fence Me In'' and shared its yearning sentiment, though our landscape was that of the crisscrossing wires, tall buildings, and rectilinear boundaries of south Chicago. Where we lived there was nothing but fences: even the tiniest lawns had their ankle-high hoops of wire warning you and your dog to keep off. No matter. If anything, these realities made the sentiment and the locale of that song all the more appealing. We sang, too, ''Pistol Packin' Mama,'' and while I don't recall if the locale of that heat-carrying woman was ever specified, it sounded as if it came out of Texas-for us, the quintessential Western state. When we sang, ''The Stars at night/Are big and bright,'' then supplied the four quick Spanish-tinged handclaps that preceded ''Deep in the heart of Texas,'' we saw an immense sky, a cowboy on his horse, a tall cactus with candelabra arms.
KILLING MISTER WATSON By Peter Matthiessen Random House, $21.95 Fiction
Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few. The white terns look dirtied in the somber light and they fly stiffly, feeling out an element they no longer trust. Unable to locate the storm-lost minnows, they wander the thick waters with sad muted cries, hunting signs and seamarks that might return them to the order of the world.
In the hurricane's wake, the labyrinthine coast where the Everglades deltas meet the Gulf of Mexico lies broken, stunned, flattened to mud by the wild tread of God. Day after day, a gray and brooding wind nags at the mangroves, hurrying the unruly tides that hunt though the broken islands and twist far back into the creeks, leaving behind brown spume and matted salt grass, driftwood. On the bay shores and down the coastal rivers, a far gray sun picks up glints from windrows of rotted mullet, heaped a foot high. My odyssey with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer began, like many Hollywood stories, at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
