After Us the Dragons

THE NIGHT COUNTRY, REFLECTIONS OF A BONE HUNTING MAN by Loren Eiseley. 240 pages. Scribners. $7.95.

Are we quite sure who Loren Eiseley is? One of those philosophizing scientists--isn't he?--constantly being praised for his literary graces? A figure on TV panel discussions, a professor somewhere or other, repeatedly granting interviews on the meaning of life and the future of mankind?

There is indeed something solemnly institutional about Eiseley, the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science and Curator of Early Man at the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps only someone with such an array of titles would drift into such rhetoric as "the frail confines of the human heart," and then, on the same page, "the windswept uplands of the human mind."

But there is another Loren Eiseley, as this eighth book of his makes clear. This is the Eiseley who grew up listening to his father recite Shakespeare to his stone-deaf wife; the Eiseley who rode the rails during the Depression, who has spent much of his life hunting for hones in caves, and who believes that the process of evolution will lead in startling directions: "I always say to myself hopefully, 'After us the dragons.' "

A half century ago, Eiseley watched and heard his father dying of cancer, and ever since then he has suffered from insomnia. That was how he came to live in "the night country," a place of fear and uncertainty, where the rules of daylight no longer apply, and the animal with the yellow eyes is no longer tame. Once you have come to know the night country, you remember it even when the sun is shining.

Eiseley has met strange creatures in the night country, and he tells marvelous stories about them. He tells of a farmer who has a monster living in the well beneath his house, and a novelist who offered a toast to the triumph of mankind, unaware that he was being observed by a bemused rat. He tells of an old rancher who shocked his family by keeping the skeleton of his sister, murdered by Apaches, in the china closet. And of the lonely bachelor who had found and fallen in love with what he believed to be a petrified woman.

For Eiseley, storytelling is never pure entertainment. The autobiographical tales keep illustrating the theses that wind through all his writing--the fallibility of science, the mystery of evolution, the surprise of life. Thus dramatized, such concepts seem not preachy but triumphantly self-evident.

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