Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amour (Bantam: $17.95; 358 pp.)

There’s prolific, of course, and then there’s prolific , and somewhere on the far side of prolific there’s Louis L’Amour with more than 85 novels in print, each one of which has sold more than 1 million copies. But far more than the IBM of the cottage industry known as novel writing, the indefatigable L’Amour’s literary output is exceeded only by the vastness of his curiosity and the historic and geographic range of that curiosity. Although an acknowledged authority on the American frontier, he has also plumbed 12th-Century Europe, the 17th-Century southeast and now, in “Last of the Breed,” contemporary Siberia, the Soviet Union’s frozen, lock-the-door-and-throw-away-the-key wasteland, lying a hand’s span from our own Alaska.

Take a basic and unadorned plot: Air Force Maj. Joseph (“Joe Mack”) Makatozi, flying an experimental plane over the Bering Sea, is shot down by the Soviets and tucked away in a no-name Siberian prison camp until the secrets of that plane can be extracted from him. Air Force pilot escapes and heads, not for the climatically more benign--but more closely guarded--China border, but straight into the wilds of the Siberian tundra where, even with the amenities of civilization, man is lucky to survive the 80-below winters. In swift pursuit: Zamatev, a ruthless and efficient GRU officer, whose political future is on the line in a society where valuable prisoners simply do not escape. Not too complicated, right? Right. But add a couple of elements. First, Maj. Joe Mack, not your ordinary flyboy but an American Indian (part Sioux, part Cheyenne) of near-Olympic athletic capabilities in whose blood old survival instincts and old killer instincts are stirred by this thrust backward into the sort of primitive and hostile environment that his forefathers knew. Then, Mack’s counterpart: Zamatev’s chief tracker, Alekhin, himself a 20th- Century holdover of a warrior society that parallels Mack’s--a Yakut, native of a harsh land with roots going back deep into Turkish culture.

What sort of fool, at the onset of winter with no clothes, food, weapons or friends, plunges headlong across such a land--almost 2,000 miles from the prison camp to the Bering Strait, across three mountain ranges, and an iffy water escape to Alaska? A “fool” with complete confidence in the lessons learned at the knee of his ancestors--how to live off the land, trap fur for warmth, and shape arrows as deadly as anything issued by the U.S. Air Force. The sort of “fool” also driven by the knowledge that the Red Man--thousands of years before--had followed this very route from Asia to the New Land when a land bridge had connected the two continents. Increasingly aware that this is no normal man he is pursuing, Zamatev keeps bumping the pot--bringing in more and more troops, helicopters, firepower--and it’s suddenly no longer a mere chase, but a private war.

As newspaperman and turn-of-the-century pop fiction writer Richard Harding Davis illustrated in his short story, “The Most Dangerous Game,” a cunning man is the deadliest prey in the world for other men. In passive flight no longer, Joe Mack strikes back from the shadows . . . ice unexpectedly melts where it shouldn’t, and a squadron of Soviet soldiers plunge into freezing water. An avalanche suddenly develops. Now, how could that happen? Exhaustive research shows on almost every page of “Last of the Breed” as L’Amour spins this gripping tale of old virtues and new villainies in head-on confrontation. The old storyteller painlessly teaches us more about the nature of the Soviet military psyche, and life in the unworldly beauty of Siberia, than we could learn from a dozen dry texts. Does Joe Mack make it?

Wouldn’t a master like Louis L’Amour keep you dangling--unsure of that--right up to the last page?