Mountain Blood

In his introduction, the author wrestles with the distinction between fact and fiction, the real and the imaginary. Baker, an English professor at the University of California, is the first winner of the Associated Writing Program Award for Creative Non-Fiction, an award administered by a national union of universities. His seven pieces encompass reminiscence, personal experience and reflections on historyembellished by imagination. A small boy catches his first trout; a youth in Idaho's lumber country works in a sawmill and thinks about his girl. Later, the author, in search of a disreputable great-uncle, remembers with bitterness his own failed marriage. Stories about his prospector grandfather lead him to abandoned mines in Mexico and a self-sufficient native family. Baker meditates on suburbs that now occupy Indian hunting grounds in ""Letter to a Nebraska Housewife.'' His tales are powerful evocations of the American West, past and present. Illustrations. (March)