The River Why, David James Duncan, Sierra Club: 312 pp., $14.95 paper My Story as Told by Water David James Duncan, Sierra Club: 296 pp., $14.95 paper The Beluga Cafe: My Strange Adventure With Art, Music, and Whales in the Far North, Jim Nollman, Sierra Club: 308 pp., $16.95 paper

The 20th anniversary edition of “The River Why” gives those of us who may have missed this classic a second chance at discovery. In the novel, young Gus, spawn of a world-famous fly-fisherman and his bait-fishing cowgirl bride, comes of age and makes a beeline for an isolated cabin by a river, to live one man’s version of the ideal life: fishing every minute of every day. He leaves his father (nicknamed H2O), his mother (The River Ma) and his mystical younger brother Billy Bob, and the comforts of home, including the daily dinner debates like fly versus bait or “The Great Izaak Walton Controversy.” Gus’ solitude lasts until he becomes a local legend for his fishing prowess and until he is rendered inarticulate and ineffectual by a fleeting vision of a mysterious and beautiful female angler. “There’s not much more to tell,” Gus tells us in “The Last Chapter.” “It was of the line of light and of the touch of the hand of love that I wanted to speak.”

“The River Why” found its audience, and “My Story as Told by Water,” a 2001 collection of essays, explains how David James Duncan chose his writing path. He is often compared to Norman Maclean, though Duncan writes that his bank account certainly bears no resemblance to Maclean’s. Their books, however, “speak in long, idiosyncratic sentences of rivers, fly-fishing, and beloved but inscrutable younger brothers; both were rejected by every big publisher in the land before being taken up by small presses; both were read by hundreds of thousands.”

But Duncan confesses, “I would gladly give up ‘The River Why’ and all it’s given me if I could get back the waters that inspired the book in the first place,” all the creeks and rivers of his childhood that have been polluted and destroyed. In “My Story as Told by Water,” he describes a childhood spent moving from one beautiful place to another, chased by developments that erased their beauty like so many words on a page. Duncan’s adulthood has been spent off the grid: “Capitalist fundamentalism, I still believe, is the perfect Techno-Industrial religion, its goal being a planet upon which we’ve nothing left to worship, worry about, read, eat, or love but dollar bills and Bibles.”

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“I play music with animals -- granted, an unusual vocation,” confesses Jim Nollman, who is not a scientist, not a painter, not a professional musician, but a strange, new unabashed species of naturalist. “A collaborator once described what I do as ‘just two warm-blooded mammals out on the water getting into a groove.’ ” Nollman, who founded a nonprofit called Interspecies Inc., has for 25 years traveled the globe to play music to beluga and other whale species, dolphins, monkeys, moose, caribou and ravens. As a writer and as a naturalist, he is more irreverent than sanctimonious, doing what he does just for the pure fun of it.

“The Beluga Cafe” begins in 1987, when Nollman and a friend traveled up to the Mackenzie Delta in Alaska and to the Beaufort Sea to play music (using underwater speakers and recorders) to belugas. It did not take long for them to be labeled “Greenpeacers” by the local Inuit whale hunters, in spite of the fact that Nollman and his friend are neither for nor against native whale hunting, as long as the hunt does not involve “mindless tapping into the macroeconomy ... no spring-steel animal traps, no Boston Whalers with twin Mercs. No Old Crow hidden beneath the floorboards. No floorboards.” Some of the natives think it’s great; others suspect the two are playing orca sounds to scare away the belugas. Nollman dreams of his detractors one night: Ted Koppel on Nightline saying, “Is it interspecies communication or just one man’s fantasy?” And “a frowning Miles Davis” saying to them all, beyond the grave, “Hey man, get a life.”