Mr. Clark appears in this collection of his short stories ["The Watchful Gods and Other Stories"] as a sensitive and cultivated writer, as much at home with knowledgeable outdoor men and their natural world as with intellectuals and academicians whose connection to the earth on which they live is only that of a man to his city apartment.

This unlikely but graceful combination seems to be responsible for a prose style that is wiry, masculine, and mature, and that has produced almost by its own evocative power—without the aid of complex structuring—a number of interesting stories, and one at least that is really superb. The Wind and the Snow of Winter brings a lonely and addled old prospector to the terrible realization of his own senility, as he plods slowly across the bleak Western landscape with the dreamlike cinematic movement of the cowboys in Mr. Clark's...