In a Dark Wood : SANCTUARY: A Tale of Life in the Woods.<i> By Paul Monette, illustrations by Vivienne Flesher</i> .<i> Scribner: 95 pp., $17</i>

Paul Monette is best known for memoirs of mortality and masculinity--for “Borrowed Time,” a book about his lover’s sufferings with HIV, and for “Becoming a Man,” which won the National Book Award. “Sanctuary,” his last piece of writing, completed before his death in 1995, is a very different style of work, an animal fable subtitled “A Tale of Life in the Woods.”

These are not Robert Bly’s woods, where men drum in hopes of discovering their inner grizzly, but an undisturbed habitat protected by an androgynous witch (“she woke some days as a man”) whose spell turns trespassers away. As the pressure from the human world builds up, the witch pours more and more energy into the spell, until she must lay down her life to preserve it. She renounces her immortality to secure her life’s work, dying as an entity but not as a force.

If the woods are so wonderful, we would expect them to be vividly described, but the author doesn’t rise above the level of generic idyll, with a jarring use of comparisons from the excluded human world: “The spell is like a laser.” It’s “stronger than barbed wire shot through with a lethal current.” It throbs in the witch’s temples “like migraine.” The power of her will burns “like phosphorus.”

“Sanctuary” is short and sketchy, and it falls awkwardly into a number of sections. After the witch’s death her familiar, the great horned owl, usurps her position without having any actual power. At this point, ecological idyll seems to be giving way to political parable, “FernGully: The Last Rainforest” to “Animal Farm.”

The owl, sensing trouble building outside the border, creates discord among the animals by inventing a threat of overpopulation. He takes credit for the magical safety of the woods and warns that measures must be taken at some future time to separate the First Ones from refugees who have fled to the woods from habitats that lacked supernatural protection. The animals must be alert to any hint of differentness.

One of the problems with “Sanctuary” is that its conventions keep shifting. An animal fable that requires all the creatures of the woods--predators and prey alike--to attend a meeting and listen to a Machiavellian owl is short on the logic of the classic fairy story, where animal distinctions are lightly retained and the lion doesn’t lie down with the lamb merely to listen to a political address. At different times the fauns of the story seem to be instinctive in their behavior, or emotional, or even rational.

Differentness soon turns up, in the disconcerting form of a love affair between Lapine and Renarda--between a rabbit and a fox. Tactful Renarda gives up eating meat so as not to embarrass her lover, though in an animal fable a fox’s carnivorousness is hardly a characteristic that can be dropped at will. As for the fox’s other fabular trait, cunning, Renarda has none to cast off. It’s a joint decision by the couple to build a lair with a double entrance, to preserve the proprieties.

This cozy-bizarre arrangement is reminiscent of houses in the 1950s converted by pairs of gay male and lesbian couples, so that a man and a woman could be seen respectably entering each of two front doors, though the domestic reality was other. And indeed Lapine and Renarda break convention not only by being different in species but by sharing a gender: They’re both females.

In animal fables and their modern descendants, animal cartoons, difference in species already stands in for difference in gender. Ren and Stimpy share a bed and both seem to be male, but one’s a cat and the other’s a Chihuahua, so that’s all right. They form a child’s idea of a couple. In “Sanctuary,” these conventions give way, and what takes their place is distinctly icky.

The owl, for instance, has a gender but no sex life, while other animals rut instinctively. Only between Lapine and Renarda is there love, which seems to mean in practice mutual rooming. “ ‘I don’t think I’m looking anymore,’ Renarda said in a husky whisper. With that she leaned over Lapine and planted a kiss on her lips, stroking the rabbit’s shiny fur till Lapine fairly shivered with delight. Then they stretched out and clung to each other mutely, basking in their new and sudden bond.”

Readers of “Sanctuary,” for whom the issue of sexuality has been insistently raised--made the engine of the tiny plot--and then treated with great coyness, may find themselves asking that unforgivably incorrect question: What do rabbits and foxes actually do in bed? The fey earnestness of the story is likely to provoke giggles and other unforgivable questions: Does it still count as bestiality if you’re both animals?

The story is too short to generate much in the way of suspense and, in any case, most of the population of the woods is on the side of the lovers, despite the owl’s attempts to stir them up. The couple even have a go-between in the form of a bear who is an ex of the young fox (Renarda seems to be something of an interspecies swinger).

The situation is finally resolved by a deus ex machina, a tyro magician who tracks down the witch’s spell, breaks its borders and brings her back to life. The witch turns out to be Sleeping Beauty after all, though earlier she had seemed to be a fantasy self-portrait, dying into her spell as the writer dies into his work.

It gives no pleasure to resist the charms of a modest piece of work that must have cost its maker infinite pains even in its sketchiness, writing as he was on time borrowed at a drastic rate of interest. But there are no excuses in art. Not everyone can write a memoir of his lover’s life and death, or a meditation on American masculinity, but nor can everyone write another “Bambi.”