North of 53

PLAIN TALES OP THE NORTH-- Thierry Mallet--Putnam ($2). Captain Mallet is president of a fur company (Revillon Freres) whose flag, flapping at the masthead of a trading schooner, has been watched for and hailed by Indians and Eskimos on the headlands of Labrador and Hudson's Bay for two centuries. Besides traveling in Siberia and soldiering in France, Captain Mallet has visited these hardy trappers many times. Evidently he has found time for good reading on his trips, or maybe it is through his Gallic inheritance that he comes by the lucid, restrained prose in which, a page or two at a time, he relates brief episodes of camp and trail. They are quiet, unpretentious little sketches, dramatized no whit, yet filled with the mystery and magnitude of nature, wild and human, that the writer has experienced "north of 53."

A small red bull dashes around a bend on a frozen river pulling the lead trace of a sledge, a husky dog snapping at his hocks, a" nervous German prospector clinging to the baggage. ... A polar she-bear defends her cubs. . . . An Indian child and crone slay a swimming moose with a hand-ax. . . . A cunning wolf robs fishnets. . . . An Indian tries to sell his frozen baby as dogfood. ... A pickerel attacks a gull. ... A starving fisher outwits a porcupine. . . . An old man enters a shed to feed 18 unchained lynxes. . . . An Indian lad fills his dead father's post piloting the steamboat down a snaggle-bouldered Alaskan river. . .