Indian Maze

By P.G.

WINTER IN THE BLOOD by JAMES WELCH 176 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

The narrator of this small first novel is a nameless American Indian. 32 years old, "servant," as he describes himself, "to a memory of death." He already has plenty to remember. His older brother died at 14, crumpled by a car while trying to drive cattle across a Montana highway. After years of "making white men laugh" at local bars, his father failed to come home one night. He was later found frozen "stiff as a slat" in a snowdrift. The narrator thinks that something has died in him as well; he feels "no hatred, no love, no guilt, no conscience, nothing but a distance that had grown through the years."

So he sleepwalks through chores on his mother's land and binges in neighboring honky-tonks. He falls in with a scheme to spirit an eccentric white man across the Canadian border. When the plan is aborted, he simply tosses away the keys to the car that was to be his payment. He is bloodied in a brawl. Then another death ensues, that of his ancient grandmother. She had once been the third wife of a revered -- and defeated -- Blackfoot chief. Watching her die, the grandson learns something of her heroism and finds another survivor, his own grandfather, to link him to the tragic past of his people.

The vision is brief, its echo swal lowed by Montana's vast emptiness. But it reveals that the hero's feigned indifference to life is a sham. He inwardly craves all the things to which he has tried to close his heart: love and loyalty, and a purpose that will root him to the land his forebears lost. Near the book's end, he tries to rescue a cow that is in danger of drowning in mud. The task is mock-heroic, emblematic of the best he can expect from existence. But he struggles furiously, engaged in the grubbiness of life through an inertia of commitment that is stronger than protective cynicism.

Novelist James Welch, 34, neatly juggles despair and hope; the book's sur faces convey both a sad seediness and a tumbledown vitality. Himself an Indian (Blackfoot and Gros Ventre), Welch lives on a 40-acre farm outside Missoula, Mont., where he is now at work on a second novel. Whites, he feels, tend to be too sympathetic or too harsh when they write about Indians. "We don't have those obstacles. To us, being an In dian is home." With remarkable force, Winter in the Blood brings its experiences home to others. Its prose is as dry and tough as pemmican. It turns a long historic outrage into a short, relentlessly unsentimental elegy.

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