Rick Bass' stories immerse the reader in a dreamy, languid ocean of mystery. Set in Texas, Mississippi and Montana, and told by male narrators, they probe warily around some deep, unsayable truth as if pinpointing it would break a spell. Written with a fluid, unpretentious lyricism, they are vivid and original testimonies to life's enduring strangeness. Bass emerged on the literary scene in 1989 with The Watch, a story collection that immediately marked him as an accomplished practitioner of the genre. Platte River, published last year, solidified his reputation. Meanwhile, Bass has written a series of nonfiction books—including Winter, The Ninemile Wolves and the forthcoming The Lost Grizzlies—that demonstrate his prowess as an observer of the natural world.

In the 10 stories that make up Bass' superb new book, In the Loyal Mountains, the beauty and vitality of the out-of-doors is a given. The book teems with fish and game, with owls hooting, bears hiding in the woods and deer silently stalking. Mountains and lakes offer refuge from city stresses. Yet nature is not only powerful, as mighty, irresistible force or as incomparable source of spiritual sustenance, but also fragile, as victim of a sometimes ignorant and merciless humankind.

“Days of Heaven,” told by a caretaker at a Montana ranch owned by wealthy outsiders eager to “develop” it, is one of the less memorable stories because of its too obvious pro-environmental agenda. Much more persuasive is a story like “The History of Rodney,” in which a random shifting in the course of the Mississippi River has turned a once thriving southern village into a ghost town. In Bass' magical rendering, the river becomes a symbol for unpredictable undercurrents that are mirrored in the narrator's love affair.

“Swamp Boy” neatly captures the modern world's simultaneous awe before nature and its desire to subdue it. The narrator looks back to a Houston boyhood when he and his buddies would beat up a fat, bespectacled youth who spent his days picking berries and flowers and collecting specimens for his aquarium. Throughout, the narrator insists that he went along with these rituals of humiliation—including stringing the kid upside-down in a tree—only as an observer. Then at the end of the story we learn that he was the swamp boy, thus embodying the larger culture's ambiguity.

In “Antlers,” the inhabitants of a remote Montana valley partake in another odd ritual. At Halloween, they gather at the local tavern to drink, dance and carouse while wearing antlers. All this takes place in a context of men who hunt and the woman who serially beds them. Her sole refusal is to a man she finds cruel because his bow-and-arrow hunting results in a slow, painful death for the animal. Here the juxtapositions of love and death, humans and animals, and humans dressed like animals, work to expose human emotions, to display them in their raw, “uncivilized” clarity.

“Fires,” which seems to be set in the same valley, is about the friendship that develops between a local man and a world-class runner spending a summer there for high-altitude training. His job is to trail her during her runs on a bicycle, as a gun-toting guard against bears. He has no mate and she is temporarily separated from her boyfriend. Their relationship is intense—she asks him to feel her heart after every run—and largely wordless and altogether chaste. In the background are the fires the government uses to manage forest growth. One last fire before her departure, like their non-affair, nearly explodes out of control.

In “The Legend of Pig-Eye,” an aspiring young boxer trains amid rural Mississippi splendor and then heads out to broken-down bars to drum up fights. Mack's trainer-manager hopes to prime him for the big time. But whether he has the goods, despite his nearly 100 victories, is suspect, as is his desire. Bass makes his after-practice lake swims symbolize those question marks. For Mack knows that what he calls “The Lake of Peace” may also have been the place where a previous protege, Pig-Eye, committed suicide once his ring career began to decline.

The title story is a middle-aged Texan's retrospective on a big-spending, high-spirited uncle who treated him like a son and ended up a crook and a suicide. Uncle Zorey flew the teenaged Jackie off to hunt and fish; he supplied him with a girlfriend (in fact a hooker); he drove them all into the hill country for picnics and swims. The story conveys Jackie's gratitude to a terribly flawed man as well as his dismay that it took so long to appreciate the subtler virtues of his father, a golf pro regarded in the papers as a class act.

Even in this story, in which divided human loyalties are more central than nature's revelations, one sees the subtle Rick Bass magic at work. As the writer noted in an interview with this paper last year, “You never say the thing the story's about. Just go all around the edge until, like one of those glass cutters, you cut a circle in the glass and the glass falls out—until you capture it, and walk away.” Readers will walk away amazed.