BOOK REVIEW : ‘Fate of the Alligators’: Nature Writer Turns to Urban Chronicles : THE FINAL FATE OF THE ALLIGATORS: Stories From the City <i> by Edward Hoagland</i> ; Capra Press $9.95 paper; 181 pages

Although Edward Hoagland has published a few novels, he is best known as a writer of nature essays, such as those found in his collection “The Courage of Turtles.”

It’s a little disconcerting, consequently, to learn that he started out in almost the opposite sphere--as a chronicler, in short fiction, of life in urban New York. “The Final Fate of the Alligators” (titled, no doubt with his nature-loving audience in mind) highlights four such stories, plus a few others.

Three of them--the last three, oddly--are first rate. All were published in the 1960s in magazines like Esquire and The Paris Review. Sometimes the stories come together; sometimes they don’t. But you always have the sense of being in the hands of a technically skilled writer--though one who has yet to find a subject with which to fall in love.

The exception is “The Last Irish Fighter,” for here Hoagland seems very much at home with his material--even though the subject, boxing, seems about as far removed from nature writing as you can get (unless one calls Hemingway a nature writer too).

Kelly, as a fighter, would be a has-been except that he never was. He has returned to the Better Champions Gym on 42nd Street to make some extra money. Within minutes, he has a new manager who figures Kelly will appeal to Irish fans, and before the afternoon is out boxes rounds with two other fighters.

The story is more about close observation--the rhythms of the speed bag, the strategy of combination punches, the importance of timing and movement--until the very end. Then Kelly, relishing the rediscovery of his craft, learns once again that boxing is a business.

“The Witness” is told in the first person by a laboratory assistant, Gene, working in a run-down part of lower Manhattan. The lab is small and brings in little work, so Gene spends much of his day looking out the window, onto Lafayette Street--”a large brutal one-way thoroughfare, always a drama in progress.”

Gene becomes “a kind of last resort” for street people, calling cops, feeling pulses and dragging passed-out bums from harm’s way, and he gradually makes enemies of the gas station mechanics across the street for being “nosy.”

Things get touchy when Gene sees the mechanics covering up an accident in which a pushcart vendor is killed. Events come to a head after his relationship with a neighbor sours and his job turns dead-end; with nothing to lose, Gene takes a stand. Seeing the mechanics refuse to pay a casual employee, Gene rushes downstairs to help, only to find that the man is willing to stand up alone against these men and that he himself is “nothing, unable to cross the street, unable to function.”

The story ends with a beautifully phrased strategic retreat: “After a few days at home sleeping, drinking milkshakes, I called up an uncle of mine in the Midwest and borrowed enough to move Uptown and devote myself to making a different start in the city.”

The last story worth special note, “Cowboys,” is by no means a city story. It derives in part, as Hoagland notes, from five months he spent with the Ringling Brothers circus in the early 1950s.

Spike, a former Marine turned animal handler, works for a traveling carny. When he finds himself having to compete for audiences with a rodeo in eastern Oregon, he decides to show the rodeo riders a thing or two.

He gathers up his pals, Zino the ‘gator wrestler and Airborne the elephant trainer, heads over to the rodeo and informs a group of napping cowboys in his best drill-sergeant manner, “You people! Get this clear! Because your soul may still belong to God but as of now your ass is mine!”

The cowboys struggle to their feet as Spike continues his rant and respond by opening the gate to the nearby corral. The carny men panic, of course, the horses “pouring forth like a dam had burst, in a wall of dancing crazy water,” but they can’t escape. The cowboys mount their horses and show Spike and his friends a few humiliating rope tricks.

“Cowboys,” first published in 1960, is a funny story and shows that Hoagland could well have limited himself to writing fiction. We should be thankful that he didn’t--and that he didn’t listen to his father, who tried to discourage him from writing altogether.

When Hoagland’s first novel was accepted by Houghton Mifflin, Hoagland writes in the foreword, his father wrote the publisher’s lawyer asking that publication be stopped on the grounds that the book was obscene. Hoagland doesn’t say so, but it’s a good bet that the incident made him want to write all the more.