THE DEER PASTURE by Rick Bass,...

THE DEER PASTURE by Rick Bass, illustrated by Elizabeth Hughes Bass (W.W. Norton: $12, 123 pp.). Originally published in 1985, these reflections on a small plot of the Texas hill country where three generations of his family have hunted whitetail deer helped to establish Bass as a nature writer. He learned that the hunt was less important than the time spent communing with nature on this scruffy turf. The dry brush country is not the stuff of picture postcards, but Bass loves it nonetheless.