Fishing for His Son : RIVER SONG <i> by Craig Lesley (Houghton Mifflin: $18.95) 352 pp.; 0-395-43083-6 </i>

For believers in archaic cyclical time, minutes and hours and days do not line up one after another like dominoes poised to knock each other forward into some yawning gorge of a future, but rather, time swirls and eddies, is circular and vaporous, as changeable and thin as the clouds surrounding the Earth, as repetitive as the seasons. In this atmosphere of mutable layers, rents can appear in the mist, allowing old souls to slip through and mingle with the living.

It is precisely this feeling of archaic time and ancestral communion that Craig Lesley captures poignantly and with loving simplicity in his fine second novel, “River Song,” a moving account of contemporary Indian life in the Pacific Northwest. At the heart of the novel is the dreamlike search for nexus and meaning, the struggle Indians face to survive in an economically depressed area where traditional fishing rights are threatened, and the attempt of a father and son to come to terms with each other and their heritage in a society dominated by whites.

“River Song” is a sequel to “Winterkill,” Lesley’s first novel, which won the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award for Best Novel of 1984. I don’t know if Lesley himself is an American Indian, but he certainly writes convincingly of one who is, namely Danny Kachiah, the figure at the center of his novels.

Danny Kachiah is a divorced, middle-aged, Nez Perce drifter. He earns a meager living at seasonal work--thinning pears in Oregon orchards, fighting forest fires, catching salmon on the Columbia. It’s a loose, unfocused existence. There is nothing terribly romantic about a man like Danny. His very ordinariness is what the reader connects with.

Things begin to change for him when his ex-wife, Loxie, is killed in a car crash and his teen-age son, Craig, becomes his responsibility. With the arrival of Craig comes a sense of ghostly presences, apparitions, beckoning whistles, a feeling of something unresolved from the past. He has a vision of a massacre of miners near a cabin on a river. Stick Indians--”Steah-hah”--haunt him, and his dead wife, Loxie, appears to both him and Craig. What do these ghost walkers mean to tell them. The quest for an answer sends Danny to a healer named Wauna, who he hopes will be able to help.

Danny watches as his son drifts toward the life of a rodeo rider, just as he himself had done at his age. Pudge, his dead wife’s sister, berates him for being a poor father. The truth is, he doesn’t know his son very well, and something divides them:

“He had just started being a father, but perhaps it was already too late . . . although Loxie had been dead almost a year, she seemed to stand between them, and Danny realized the boy sided with his mother. Every story had two versions, but Loxie was dead, and that gave her version the edge.”

He realizes how little the boy knows of the old ways--ways that Danny’s own father, Red Shirt, was negligent in teaching him because he was often too drunk to impart the stories and chants, and he resolves to show Craig a few of the places important to the People. He takes his son to see petroglyphs, faces of sacred spirits painted on the walls of the Columbia River Gorge, and encounters Willis Salwish, an elderly friend of his father’s. When Willis offers Danny and Craig a place in his fishing camp and a portion of the profits from the seasonal netting of salmon, they accept and soon become involved in a violent battle between renegade sports fishermen and Indians over the fishing rights on the river.

“River Song” takes on a palpable excitement in the passages dealing with the fishing rights dispute while offering a more lyrical and dreamlike beauty when Danny Kachiah makes the journey to the Hell’s Canyon of the Snake River where the meaning of the massacre-vision is finally revealed. The novel is both an adventure tale and a more subtle story of personal quest and discovery.

Whether writing about a Washat ceremony or the river moving under the moon, or the backbreaking work of net fishing, Lesley has an almost holy sense of the particular. The landscape, especially is evoked with reverential feeling. “River Song” joins the current of fine contemporary fiction, which includes the work of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, telling us what it means to be part of the American Indian tradition, with its rich and ancient animistic beliefs.