The Heart of Brightness : AN OUTDOOR JOURNAL Adventures and Reflections<i> by Jimmy Carter (Bantam: $18.95; 275 pp.) </i>

Having penned the obligatory memoirs of his presidency, as well as weighty books on the Mideast, the “golden years” and the art of negotiation, Jimmy Carter, in “An Outdoor Journal: Adventures and Reflections,” turns to the first love of his youth and the refuge of his stormy adult life: the primal world of hunting and fishing.

The nation, it must be noted, has not been waiting breathlessly for this event. Carter was hounded from office like a wounded hare, and, until the recent tentative stirrings of political rehabilitation, he has exceeded even Richard Nixon as the elder statesman Americans most wanted to forget. Now, in this year’s bloody open season of partisan politics, the Carter presidency is once again fair game.

Why would Carter, as high-minded and work-driven a President as we have seen in many decades, write a book about what he does for recreation? To his credit, Gerald Ford has thus far spared us a treatise on golf; Ronald Reagan, a ghostwritten, “morning in America” paean to clearing brush. Why can’t Carter just keep his encyclopedic knowledge about fishing rods and the like to himself?

In the opening sentence of “A River Runs Through It,” a classic reminiscence of growing up in Montana, Norman Maclean writes: “In my family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”

Much the same could be said of Carter, a fly fisherman later in life but already an angler at age 4. “ ‘Why do you hunt and fish?’ I’m often asked,” begins Carter in this cheerful and sometimes revealing memoir. The remainder of “An Outdoor Journal” elaborates on his intriguing answer: “My father and all my ancestors did it before me. It’s been a part of my life since childhood, and part of my identity, like being a Southerner or a Baptist.”

In a series of deft and nostalgic strokes, Carter evokes his Depression-era childhood in Plains, a farmer’s son with ready access to woods, fields and streams where young Jimmy learned to hunt from his father and to fish from the likes of Rachel Clark, a black neighbor who worked in his father’s fields. Of his father, he writes: “He seemed to love me more and treated me as something of an equal when we were in the dove field, walking behind a bird dog, or on a stream.”

The boy tests himself, tastes failure, learns how to stalk game and outwit fish, to endure physical hardships, to give his quarry a sporting chance, to kill only what the Carter family or neighbors can eat. The lessons stick with him: Not only does Carter enter manhood with an intimate knowledge of and passion for the outdoors, but the experience has gone a long way toward forging the man who will become President--his stoicism, doggedness and code of fair play in a world that may not play fair.

True to its subtitle, “Adventures and Reflections,” most of Carter’s book recounts numerous hunting and fishing experiences during Carter’s adult life, ranging from Camp David to New Zealand, from Switzerland to Alaska. Speckled with wry wit (Sample: “All were avid fly-fishers except Amy (Carter), who, not yet mature, still believed there were higher priorities in life”), these accounts also inform with Carter’s formidable layman’s knowledge of natural history.

One begins to realize how rare a President was Carter in the latter half of the 20th Century--a man whose early and persistent exposure to outdoor life helped define an ethic. Though Carter touches modestly on his record as an environmentalist, not since Theodore Roosevelt has a President boasted such first-hand acquaintance with the natural world, nor regarded its fate with such personal concern. By comparison, Reagan’s link to the outdoors is pure Hollywood--a celluloid cowboy. Unlike Reagan’s, Carter appointees, such as Elliot Richardson as U.S. ambassador to the Law of the Sea conferences, were never foxes guarding the chicken coop. Viewed through the acrid vapors of the Reagan era, the achievements of Carter and his appointees in such areas as ocean protection and the preservation of Alaskan wilderness remain impressive landmarks.

Readers who oppose hunting will not feel at ease in these pages. But Carter moves quickly to try to disarm critics: “I have been made to feel more at peace about my hunting . . . because of my strict observance of conservation measures, including the deliberate protection of overly depleted game and the initiation and support of programs to increase the population of species that seem scarce.” An avid turkey hunter in Plains, Carter stalks ducks in Arkansas, ruffed grouse in Michigan and quail in Texas, painstakingly revealing his techniques and freely admitting his failures.

But failure is only transitory. By the end of each of his hunting or fishing expeditions, Carter always succeeds, invariably after educating himself about his quarry and its habitat, tenaciously doing battle until he can claim victory.

Try as one might, it is all but impossible to read a book by Carter outside the stark shadow of his political fate; though the material seems innocuous enough, his obvious pride in his prowess as an outdoorsman gives rise to speculation. As President, Jimmy Carter became ensnared in a web of public and media perceptions--that he was weak, ineffective, too slight a man for the job. But the Carter of this book--the man he wants us to know--is a man’s man, tough, durable, courageous, able to handle a gun or rod, wade swift rivers, trek through deep snow toward Everest in Nepal, shoot a poisonous snake near Rosalynn Carter’s feet, battle blue marlin worthy of Hemingway in the Caribbean. Not that Carter is macho; in fact, he is always careful to reveal how exhausted he becomes, how close he gets to physical collapse. But over the course of the book, one begins to suspect that, consciously or not, Carter is setting the record straight, combating the lingering image of weakness and salvaging his pride in an imposing exhibition of manly arts.

Because this man was also President, one reads of Carter’s exploits with a kind of voyeuristic fascination, struck repeatedly by the contrast between the political power the man had and his physical vulnerability outdoors. Carter himself is aware of the contrast and taps it for dramatic effect, as in a story he tells of almost stepping on a rattlesnake when he was President. More fundamentally, however, Carter the outdoorsman wants us to see him as he wanted us to see him walking down Pennsylvania Avenue at his inauguration: not larger than life but as an ordinary man called to perform extraordinary feats.

Carter the writer is certainly less than extraordinary. Though graceful, his prose rarely soars, and at times--as in his account of his Himalayan trek--one suspects he has done little more than embellish journal notes. Nor does he seem to relish self-examination, usually refusing to probe beneath the easy topsoil of humorous self-deprecation. Carter’s companions remain sketchy as well--perhaps his reticence protects their privacy. Aside from all the technical talk about hunting and fishing, from the observance of codes and the implied glory of associating with a famous man, what makes them the close friends Carter says they are?

Still, for a book of reminiscences that is essentially short on reflection, a reader is likely to be stretched beyond his or her expectations. When Carter allows himself unguarded moments of reflection, as he does in the childhood chapters, there is the haunting suggestion of the man-child. Elsewhere there are worlds between the lines, broad fields where the continuing opaqueness of Carter collides head on with one’s desire to know the man. Here there is no darkness--all is sunny and bright. Perhaps one day before long, packing with him all his courage, Jimmy Carter will make a deeper expedition into himself.