The Call of the Wild : THE SKY, THE STARS, THE WILDERNESS.<i> By Rick Bass</i> .<i> Houghton Mifflin: 200 pp., $23</i>

At 9,100 feet, Yovimpa Point sits on the edge of the Earth. From here the world falls away in a succession of unspoiled plateaus and cliffs that drop nearly 5,000 feet before rising again to the north rim of the Grand Canyon, leaving Yovimpa with a clear shot over forests of pinon and ponderosa pines to a horizon more than 100 miles away. The view takes you back in time as well: The gravel and dust at your feet were laid down nearly 50 million years ago, while the sediments that form the distant Vermilion Cliffs go back to the age of the dinosaurs.

Such perspectives fascinate Rick Bass, who might feel at home in this faraway place. The three novellas that constitute “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness” resonate with the myriad links, like perceptions of space and time, that connect viewer and viewed, subject and object, and persistently complicate such points of view. Each link is only relative, but each represents on an elemental level an attempt to bridge the gap between the ineffable awe and apartness that nature invokes. Bass wastes no time charting this distance. In “The Myth of Bears,” the first story in this collection, the premise--a man’s yearlong pursuit of a woman bent on escaping him--is simple enough, but Bass strips away subtlety to amplify loss and need.

” . . . He wants her back worse than he ever wanted a pelt. Judith has been gone now almost a year.

“She broke through the cabin’s small window on a January night during a wolf moon when Trapper was having one of his fits. At such times something wild enters him.”

So it begins: their cat-and-mouse through the Yukon woods. It’s winter, 40 below zero. She sleeps at the base of a fire-hollowed cedar; he methodically encircles her, crying and howling as he meticulously sets traps in the drifting snow. Bass complicates this strange little disquisition on love and obsession by entering the psychological wilderness of both hunter and prey. “I am no longer running from anything. I am running to something,” she thinks, desperate at one moment to be left alone, and yet, “without the thought of him out there chasing her, hunting her . . . it’s horrible. There’s too much space.” Like an echo, the drama reverberates in the emptiness of nature that Bass has carved out. Voices call out across an empty clearing. Indians believe bears are human. Men and women hope their differences reconcilable, their apartness transcend-able.

Apartness, both humbling and exasperating, sublimates desire into flights of poetry or depredations of greed. Bass knows these impulses: They frame his fiction, provide its moral core. In “The Book of Yaak,” his story of the Yaak valley in Montana where he, his wife and children live, he ascended the pulpit to denounce the timber industry; only his lyricism for the place sweetened his bitter invectives. In “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness,” however, the blend is more masterful, guided seemingly less by anger than by possibility.

In “Where the Sea Used to Be,” Bass returns to the Mississippi Delta to write about Wallis Featherston, a petroleum engineer who, with his dog, Dudley, travels the back roads of Alabama and circles its forests in his plane looking for signs of oil. (Before his first stories were compiled and published in “The Deer Pasture” [1985], Bass worked as an oil and gas geologist in Mississippi and, later this year, will explore the region more thoroughly in his first novel, also titled “Where the Sea Used to Be.”) Again, something more mythic lies beneath Bass’ simple story line:

“People waved at Wallis and Dudley when they saw them driving, and yet he remained a mystery, unlike other things in the country. Their lives were simple and straight and filled with work and the talk about crops and the grocery store, and ever, pleasurably, hatefully, always with emotion, the weather, but he was outside these things.

“ ‘He’s got to be that way,’ an old man said, spitting, when they talked to him at the gas station. ‘He’s looking for the hardest thing to find in the world. Shit, it’s buried: It’s invisible.’ ”

Wallis succeeds--he has never drilled a dry well--because of his innate connection to the land, a connection forged by his respect for its people, his sense of its past and his shamelessly romantic imagination. “When he walked through the woods and it was quiet, he tried to imagine the sound the old waves had made”--a sound 300 million years old, made by the ancient ocean that covered this basin and supported thousands of varieties of sharks that lived in its warm waters. It’s a sound that his competition, an older man who buys up huge tracks of land, hires others to prospect and dreams of building a company like a Shell or a Phillips, will never know. More the solitary idealist, an Adam in the wilderness, Wallis has a different passion.

“He flew: long, lazy circles over towns and woods, flying low and slow: peeling an apple as he flew, sometimes. Looking for the thing, the things no one else knew to look for yet, though he knew they would find it, and rip it into shreds. He considered falling in love.”

The narrator of “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness” doesn’t consider falling in love; she has already found it with her family and the land they own in west Texas: “a 10,000-acre oasis of forest and woodland, with mountains full of blooming mountain laurel and cliffs bearing petroglyphs from 500 years ago--rock etchings of Spaniards with guns and swords and iron helmets, horses and banners--but civilization passed through like only a thin breeze.”

Middle-aged now, she lives with the memories of growing up with her father; grandfather; an old friend, Chubb; and Omar, her younger brother. Mother died when she was a girl and is buried on a bluff above the Nueces River beneath an oak that stood when Cabeza de Vaca crossed the land.

History, as timeless as the migrations of birds, as irrevocable as conquistadors and republicans, as colloquial as the broadcast of a baseball game, fills these pages in a slow, nearly hypnotic paean to a place that will assuredly evanesce. Since her mother’s death, the narrator, who remains bravely nameless, almost transient herself, admits to her confusion. “ . . . [B]eing torn in two directions by the richness of life, is what it felt like--the richness of the past, the promise of the future--and always wondering, How much of me is really me? What part has been sculpted by the land, and what part by my blood legacy, bloodline? What mysterious assemblage is created anew from those two intersections?”

In nothing less than time, she discovers her connections to this place, not the least of which are her memories: running with Omar at night down the ghostly white caliche road, past the dark sweet smelling cedars, past the ancient headstone, past Chubb’s cabin with its light on and through the river, feeling with bare feet ancient wagon wheel ruts cut in the submerged stone. “There is no true fence, no stone wall, between the present and the past,” she begins to understand. Her education, however, never slips into sentimentality; Bass never loses sight of its relevance. Anything that breaks with the past disrespects the future, a lesson that angrily drives the polemic of “Yaak” and is the heart and soul of “The Sky.” Here the villains are the Catfish Man and Predators Club: a man who drains the aquifer and ranchers who poison the eagles, actions that change the lives of the narrator and her family.

In this poignant meditation, Bass has carved a curious and meaningful niche for himself among nature writers. Though the world has irrevocably changed and degraded for the narrator, memory and hope--two parties for which Emerson had a unique fondness--rather than fostering bitterness and regret invoke love and respect. It is a picture of innocence surviving experience, perhaps as Judith will survive Trapper’s snare. But even if the hunt is successful, the bridge to the wild transgressed, as these three stories prove possible, Bass is wise to remind us that everything pursued, whether in our dreams, our relationships or our backyards, develops a response appropriate to the pursuit.

Stare out at the Earth and sky at Yovimpa, try to comprehend this incomprehensible view and know that it will change--if not for reasons of history and time then for another that may give Bass pause. Sites close to Yovimpa and not far beyond are being eyed for their oil and gas reserves, perhaps giving us reason to cry and howl at the loss.