Fresh out of college and immured in an office in Jackson, Mississippi, Bass looks back fondly on annual family deer-hunting forays. The stories in The Deer Pasture are raucous and salty—truly Texan, but reminiscent of that lovable desert rat and anarchist, Edward Abbey (who was conscripted for back-jacket commentary). Hunting, at least in this version, is decidedly social, a male-bonding ritual rather than an occasion for solitary reverie. Actually that’s not entirely fair: there’s a measure of male-female bonding in Bass’s book, too. We meet grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and girl friends; in fact the book is ably illustrated with casual, evocative sketches by a woman whom Bass dates, Elizabeth Hughes. Bass’s stories have the feel of the tall tale—humorous, absurd, extreme. Like Texas. Like Bass’s compatriots: “Edsels in a world of Fords and Chevrolets.” Take cousin Randy, for example, who once convinced Bass to run through the woods on the first day of hunting season waving a white handkerchief to simulate a deer’s tail, screaming “Hullabaloo, caneck caneck.” Consider the armadillo, a near-blind, bumbling, instinctive comedian and a major character in this book: “You will hear him before you see him … snuffling through the grass and leaves making a noise like some rain-dance shuffle step … rustle, rustle, pause-pause.” Imagine the heavy-shelled creature accidentally going through the washer in a laundromat—and leaping out of the top. Of course the purpose of visiting the deer pasture is not to laugh, but to hunt. To kill deer. Bass faces this head on, neither aggressively nor defensively. He is so eloquent on the joys of finding the hunter within that I was almost convinced. One of the happy aspects of The Deer Pasture is that it portrays a healthy landscape, replete with native animals and vegetation, inhabited by hunters and ranchers who, apparently, care for each other and their surroundings. It is a landscape that inspires hope as well as memory; for those who love it, Bass writes, it is an anchor.

Though Bass never mentions it in The Deer Pasture, petroleum geology is what occupies him in that office in Jackson, Mississippi. Oil Notes is a journal, based on entries in notebooks Bass carries with him as he works. Written in the same cocky, energetic, tumbleweed prose of The Deer Pasture, these notes hum with youthful exuberance, skipping about with the enthusiastic eclecticism of an ambitious imagination. The notes convey a good deal of information about the underground wilderness probed by geologists, and they also introduce us to other Bass addictions—such as dogs, horses, farms, tractors, the Old Coke (he purchased more than a thousand when production ceased), and the illustrator Elizabeth Hughes. Bass disciplines his disparate enthusiasms with a passion for correspondences. Borrowing a phrase from Kafka, he explains that his goal as a writer is “to free the frozen sea within.” In explaining geology, he writes of a different sea within: 250-million-year-old traces of an ocean under Alabama and Mississippi. Trapped under impermeable shale in the porous sands those seas left behind is oil. He longs to free it from the weight of the earth. His lover’s passion is for Elizabeth, who is shielded by an impermeable desire to avoid commitment. Sometimes his passions seem mutually reinforcing. Sometimes not. “Anything that’s dear to me now will someday fall away from me because of writing.” Unlike geology, writing (at least in that frame of mind) seems dishonest, a lie shielding writer from reader. Maybe. This book is a touch self-conscious, bordering on flippant in its humor; but the style is, revealingly and engagingly, Rick Bass.