‘Nobody Left Me No Buffalo’ : GAME WARS: The Undercover Pursuit of Wildlife Poachers <i> By Marc Reisner</i> ; <i> (Viking: $19.95; 294 pp.)</i>

The man is in Alaska dealing with a biker gang for walrus ivory, and a human skull rests on the table. He is in the swamps of Louisiana, dickering for alligator hides in order to supply a Mafia outlet in New York. He is in a Mississippi roadhouse taking a big shipment of illegal crappie to sell in the ghettos of the north.

This is the bizarre world of “Game Wars,” Marc Reisner’s report on the work of the roughly 200 agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who deal with a netherworld of people who sell parts of wild animals for profit.

Most of the book focuses on one obsessed man, a game warden named David Hall who operates out of Louisiana as a kind of gonzo mixture of the Lone Ranger and Indiana Jones. Along the way, the book gives a good short course in the biology and plight of walruses, the African elephant, the alligator, ducks and crappie. As a kind of grand finale, “Game Wars” also deals with the demolition by American culture of the great tidal lands that face the Gulf of Mexico.

As in most books about the environment, there is a kind of pall of doom floating over the text, but unlike most such essays, this one has fights, busts--in short, action. This time the good guys strike back, and if the outcome of the war is in question, a few battles are won here and there. This is a big attraction of the book--both for the reader and the agents. It is incredibly alluring to see someone finally do something besides lament the passing of other bloods and forms of life.

Reisner comes to this book off the success of his “Cadillac Desert” (1986), the only readable account of the Bureau of Reclamation’s campaign to destroy the American West with concrete acts of love. “Game Wars” is a different kind of investigation, but it retains the strong points of the earlier work: a broad knowledge of the ecological issues involved, and that rarest of things in works about the natural world: honest-to-God reporting.

Since Hall almost always wears a wire, the story is rich with actual conversations and, given the broad strokes of Southern life, an almost garish local color. This time one can learn a lot and still have a good read.

Basically, the war that Hall fights is against his own people, that clustering of good old boys we often call redneck culture. This is a world where men love their guns more than their women, where they’d rather go duck hunting than go to the symphony, and where both Hall and his adversaries are uncomfortable with the increasing constraints of American life. Also, everybody in this book pretty much hates the rich. In some ways, “Game Wars” is the Big Easy done as the Big Anger.

Three detective stories take up the bulk of the book, stories on alligator poaching, walrus poaching and crappie poaching. Reisner faces the same problem that confronted John Milton in “Paradise Lost”: The satanic forces prove highly interesting and temptingly attractive to the reader (though Hall, a kind of outlaw with a badge, holds his own).

Take A. J. Caro, a world-class alligator poacher who finally goes straight as a bayou bar bouncer, then helps Hall as a front man to the Mafia in New York, where he disappears into a world of stolen goods, prostitution and other money-making deals, and finally vanishes into the maw of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) as a kind of agent in Mexico and parts south. Along the way, his girlfriend is gang-raped by mobsters in New Jersey.

Most of the characters in these sagas--including Hall--are at war with the 20th Century and yearn for a kind of free-wheeling Jacksonian America. One of Hall’s early busts of a Cajun poacher captures this anger:

“ ‘Ranzell, we’re going to have to take you in.’

“Ranzell ignored them completely. He stomped up to his door, turned, and planted his feet. ‘Communist m-----------s!’

“ ‘Ranzell, we’re going to take you in. You ain’t necessarily going to have to stay in jail, but we’ve got to book you.’

“ ‘I been fetchin’ food for my kids. You want to take food out of my babies’ mouths? There ain’t enough of you Communist f-----s to take me in!’ ”

Later, Ranzell, free from jail, kills himself.

This is a book full of bad endings, both for the poachers and the animals they slaughter for profit. Hall becomes the readers’ ticket to strange milieus as he dons various disguises: He is Charles Strickland, alligator poacher and thug; Dave Hayes, gangster and oil millionaire; Big Jim Pridgen, king of illegal game catering, and so forth.

A lot of the book looks into Hall’s broodings over whether habitat destruction or poaching is the most lethal force acting against wildlife (it depends) and over the way his work is self-destructive, affecting his family life and his health. It is quite possible to argue that in the big scheme of global ecocide, neither the agents nor their adversaries matter much in the death dance of living things. But that would miss the real charm of Reisner’s work.

In a time of ozone holes, greenhouse effects, climatic change, rain-forest destruction and rapid extinction of species, he’s found some warriors who fight case by case, animal by animal to right, however temporarily, a great wrong. As the planet dies, it’s nice to find someone who stands up for the little guy, even if the little guy is a 14-foot alligator, a blubber-laden walrus or an African elephant.

If we had more people like David Hall we’d be a better country. In fact, we’d be a quite different country, one we’ve slowly killed in this century with our appetites, our pollution and our laws. As one poacher says in the book, “Nobody left me no buffalo, so I ain’t gonna leave anyone no ducks.”

Time to change. Better get Big Jim on the case.