PLATTE RIVER

 Three fascinating long stories from a greatly gifted avatar of the outdoors (The Ninemile Wolves, 1992; The Watch, 1989, etc.) The stories cross the mythic with the naturalistic, and are ruggedly male. In ``Mahatma Joe,'' an aging evangelist who's migrated from wild Alaska to an isolated but semicivilized valley in northern Montana accelerates his campaign to win favor with God before he dies; as the warm midwinter chinook blows through the valley, he plants a lush riverside garden for the sake of converts in Africa, and, though he loses his beloved Alaskan common-law wife, who drowns, he finds a new partner in a drifting hippie girl. In the haunting ``Field Events,'' a Glen Falls, New York, family- -mixed of giants and pixies--adopts a mammoth man who's first spotted by two brothers hauling a canoe full of iron objects against a river's fierce current. The brothers train the man to throw a discus farther than anyone's ever thrown it; the mother considers him the reborn soul of her miscarried eldest son; and the oldest sister, a frail, depressive gamine, marries him--teaching him to be her savior and to let himself be saved from the destructive power of his strength. Finally, in ``Platte River,'' an ex-pro football player named Harley, now living in the Montana wilderness with his restless girlfriend Shaw, spends a weekend fishing with an old buddy and two other men in northern Michigan; as fish pull free and one man openly contemplates suicide, Harley learns not to block or tackle when confronted with a problem but to ``let something go''--namely, his freedom-seeking girlfriend. Beautifully written and filled with radiant imagery and a powerful sense of the mysteries of nature--human and otherwise.