Stone On Stone

By John Skow

THE RIVERKEEPER

by Alec Wilkinson

Knopf; 191 pages; $20

Reading one of the New Yorker's long reportorial pieces is something like watching an up-country mason who knows his stuff build an unmortared stone wall. Progress is slow but nearly always interesting; and the result, gray and rough-textured, following the dips and rises of the ground at hand, is satisfying but not showy. Observing such deliberate construction can be marvelously soothing, as when Alec Wilkinson, one of the magazine's younger fact writers, lays down a long list of house names toward the beginning of an article on the Tlingit-speaking Native Americans of Admiralty Island, off the mainland of southeast Alaska.

"Some of the names," Wilkinson writes, stone on stone, "are Iron Bark House, Springwater House, Killer Whale House, Killer Whale Chasing the Seal House, Killer Whale Tooth House, Log Jam House, Mountain Valley House, On Top of the Fort House, End of the Trail House, Middle of the Village House, Bear House, Raven House, and Raven Bones House."

Splendid, the reader thinks, wall building at its best. And as the bath water cools around the islands of his knees, he follows Wilkinson through nearly 100 pages of close observation of a small village called Angoon, burned in 1882 by the U.S. Navy in a bloody-minded show of force. The author does not argue that Tlingit culture before the coming of white men was noble (arguing is not his style), but clearly it was strong and coherent. Now in Angoon, after successive incursions by Russian fishermen, the Navy, Stateside Presbyterian missionaries of ineffable arrogance, and present-day loggers, pickup-truck sellers and fish-and-game regulators, it is weak and probably dying.

Two shorter New Yorker articles, one on the Portuguese-American fishermen of Provincetown, Mass., and the other, the title piece, on an environmentalist who patrols the Hudson River, are well sketched, though they might usefully have been longer. This is solid work in a traditional landscape, and the reader resolves to watch for more of it.