NONFICTION - Jan. 1, 1995

WOMEN ON HUNTING edited and with an introduction by Pam Houston. (Ecco: $23.; 288 pp.) Pam Houston, author of “Cowboys Are My Weakness,” paraphrases Lacan in her introduction to this collection: “men desire the object of their desire, while women desire the condition of desiring, and this gives women a greater capacity for relishing the hunt.” “Good hunting,” writes Houston, is no more about killing an animal than good sex is about making babies or good writing is about publication.” Still, when she writes about the five Dall sheep she killed in her days as a guide in Alaska, it is with steely remorse, met head on. The writers in this volume include Joyce Carol Oates, Louise Erdrich, Margaret Atwood, Annie Dillard, Rosellen Brown, Melanie Rae Thon, and Terry Tempest Williams. With the more familiar writers, one notices that the way they write about hunting seems slightly tentative, as though it needed more explanation. Both the event of the hunt and the characters that participate are oddly complicated in many of these pieces. Also, there are often fathers or brothers or other men who are appreciated in the context of the hunt; their hands, or what they taught their daughters about a certain kind of patience.