Pookie and the Campjack : BROKEN COUNTRY: Mountains and Memory.<i> By C.L. Rawlins (Henry Holt: $25, 279 pp.)</i>

When we must move on, escape, rethink, restart, most of us, even in the West, drift to hide-outs in the cities. Demographics are unmistakable about this. But in our restless imaginations, and sometimes for real if we are lucky or young or desperate, we make our run for yonder hills.

In the summer of 1973, C. L. Rawlins fled the military draft and the war in Vietnam and rode into the Salt River Mountains of Wyoming at the head of a pack string to work as novice sheepherder. Alongside was an uncomplaining dog, Pookie. In his saddlebag, Rawlins packed volume No. 1 of a college anthology of world literature, a paperback copy of “Sourdough Chuckwagon Cooking” and a how-to guide called “Horses, Hitches, and Rocky Trails.”

Up where the peaks close in tight and constrict the dimensions of the world, the young campjack is engaged with knotting and splicing and cinching, the mechanics of pack horses--work to rivet in place a wandering mind. And when that is mastered, there are the simple, dangerous, demanding, lethargic, wondrous, fly-bitten, stormy days of the herder in the high country.

And nights in the canvas tent, unwashed, unshaven, with the night sounds outside and the copy of world lit to 1650, which Rawlins is determined to read.

And the poems that well up and must be written down. And the man who will become a lifelong friend who is the chief herder and teacher. And the bears and coyotes and gritty cowboy coffee. And the rotten cheese smell of the loathsome, ridiculous sheep. And the dead, bloated ewe in the stream that cannot be extracted by the legs because the putrefying limbs pull right off.

And one of those mad, heartbreaking love affairs, briefly renewed only to die up there in the mountains on the willow leaves of a creek bank, one last time, no bitterness but lavish melancholy. “Cassandra,” he has renamed the young woman: “Wet lips. Black braid, thicker than a lash rope. Kiss.”

Everyone in their youth should have such a love, and Rawlins belabors nothing in reminding us how it was really, how urgent, how physical, how happy and how consumingly sad. With careful economy of language, the ranch-hand draws 10 words out of a campfire and everybody else can bring the whole panorama to mind.

Cassandra gave him a penny whistle that night.

“And I loved her again, even more, like this, as we ate and then talked around the fire, and she told us all the places she’d seen. I played her a minor tune, slow and full of breathy notes. When the evening star appeared, we joked about wishing on it, about whose turn it was. You could almost see the heat going off the Earth, in the deepening colors of the sky.”

The editor-at-large of the biweekly Western newspaper, High Country News, and author of the previous book “Sky’s Witness,” Rawlins crafted this memoir from a 23-year-old journal, July to September, wringing out what he says was some of the too-rapt character of youth, and perhaps seasoning it lightly with the soberness of the ensuing years.

He has not, however, allowed mid-life cynicism or overt revisionism, at least so it seems, to creep into his account. “Broken Country” is faithful to youth, when things underfoot are more engaging than those over the horizon; when pores open in the mind and wonders to equal lightning storms can be absorbed from pages of literature. And because it is 1973, somewhere between Lucretius and hoof rot there is Vietnam and the thought you cannot put completely out of mind of having betrayed country and family and heritage.

Rawlins is a naturalist and from the school of naturalists who suggest that the existence of the mountains and forests and flowers is more marvelous than how they might work: the poet’s perspective, not the scientist’s. He is also, so there is no mistake, a calm and precise writer who can evoke a beaver pond, a dragonfly, wild currant berries and the subtle dependency between horse and man, and man and dog, and dog and sheep. Are such things wondrous? Perhaps so.

It is 4:30 in the morning in the Salt River Mountains and it is time to light the stove and boil coffee. There are horses to wrangle, dogs to feed, the sheep are spread all over hell, and your clothes crinkle with a crust of dust and sweat. Cassandra is gone. The war rages on.