THE CHERRY TREE BUCK

A professional storyteller shares fond, slightly elongated, memories of his grandfather, and of childhood encounters with six remarkable animals. Taking his grandfather's advice to ``start with the facts and go on from there,'' Moore recalls the clever way the old man taught a trout to breathe air, negotiated a lasting peace with marauding groundhogs, and persuaded a hen-hatched eagle that it wasn't a chicken. The author describes the scary time he brought a stuffed bear to life by imitating the grunt of a female, and puts a new twist on a tale at least as old as Baron MÅnchhausen, about a deer shot between the antlers with a cherry pit. For all his hunting and fishing, the old man never seems to kill anything (except the bear, and that's not intentional), captivities are only temporary, and an appreciation of the natural world buoys each of these episodes. A compact and engrossing follow-up to When The Moon Is Full (Knopf, 1994). (Fiction/Short stories. 9-11)