BOOK REVIEW - What the wild things are - The Animal Dialogues / Uncommon Encounters in the Wild / Craig Childs / Little, Brown: 326 pp., $24.99

Curled up in a quiet corner of the college library, I was intending to read a few pages of "The Animal Dialogues." The next thing I knew, the day was gone, the book was done and I sat there grinning with the sweet, sad grin of someone who had just finished a delicious, exotic, omnivore's meal.

Yes. Omnivore. For that is what we humans are: omnivorous animals. We eat everything. Plants. Animals. Look me in the eye. What do you see? An omnivorous, bipedal, mostly naked ape.

Craig Childs has been looking a lot of animals in the eye, including a naked ape or two, and "The Animal Dialogues" is his report of what he saw.

Childs is a child of the desert. He was born and raised in the dry lands of the American West and still lives off the grid between the Colorado mountains and searing sand with his wife and two sons. He is sometimes compared to that other gifted chronicler of the American West, Edward Abbey, but Childs is less cranky, more lyrical -- more the not-quite-domesticated coyote to Abbey's rattlesnake.

I've admired Childs' work in the past, but "The Animal Dialogues" drew me in more than his earlier books. I am, after all, a creature of the highly domesticated New England woodlands, with a natural resistance to parched places full of things that scratch, bite and poison, if they don't eat you outright. In his new book, Childs describes encounters with animals as diverse as mountain lions and great blue herons, grizzly bears and swallows, some of which I have encountered myself, others of which I am just as happy to meet on the page.

And -- take a deep breath -- we surely do meet them.

As I read Childs' description of meeting a mountain lion in the remote Blue Range Primitive Area of Arizona, the hairs were standing up on the back of my neck: "The mountain lion sizes me up and down, closing the space between us. The face says nothing, while the tail twitches like a lie detector." And there, just a few steps from the twitching tail, Childs, scared out of his wits, is trying to project a kind of truth that will dissuade the animal from ripping him limb from limb.

This is not the sort of Frank Buck "Bring 'em Back Alive" book I read as a boy, in which the animals are beasts to be shot or trapped. When I had finished Childs' chapter on mountain lions, the lion was still free in the wild and I knew more about the natural history of the big cats than I ever imagined I might. He has a gift for weaving fascinating scientific fact into compelling narrative. His book is not just an adrenaline rush; it is also an education.