The author recounts how her experience of being stalked by her abusive husband led to a job with a National Park Service search-and-rescue team, and explores the logistics, ideology, and cultural significance of "tracking." Point Last Seen offers a harrowing account of what it means to be hunted and never feel quite safe. Hannah Nyala grew up in rural Mississippi, tracking animals through the woods to shoo them away from hunters' guns. Raised by increasingly religious parents, she jumped from their arms into a suffocating marriage with a man whose escalating violence rocked her life and threatened their children. Her escape from him is temporary and tainted--he repeatedly abducts the children--but allows her to polish nascent skills as a tracker on rescue teams in the national parks. Her lucid, absorbing tracking stories anchor the book. Sown between or within them are frustratingly fragmented sketches of children and family and continuing threats from her ex-husband. In this extraordinary book, Nyala leads the reader down two interwoven trails. On one trail, she explains in exquisite prose the skills required to be a tracker, locating those lost in the wilderness. Her two main stories of real-life tracking rescues grab the reader like the best compelling fiction. The second trail in her book is rather disquieting to follow. Here she describes her life as a battered wife and then mother. The accounts of her attempts to get legal assistance, to find her kidnapped children, and to avoid physical attacks from her husband and his hired thugs are quite unsettling to read. This book belongs in nature collections because of its captivating descriptions of trackers and tracking, but it also belongs in social science and woman's collections because of Nyala's triumphs over such profound abuse. Highly recommended. [BOMC and Quality Paperback selections.]?Nancy Moeckel, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, Ohi. -?Nancy Moeckel, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, Ohio Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Nyala's unusual book reverberates like a nightmare, as memorable for the lessons it embodies as for its terror. Nyala became a tracker, someone trained to find and rescue people in the wilderness, after surviving seven years of terror and violence at the hands of her first husband. She finally escaped with her son and daughter, but her husband tracked them down and kidnapped his own children. The only solace Nyala could find was in the mountains near her Wyoming home, and she methodically overcame her fear of snakes and heights to learn how to explore the hard but glorious land. Having been prey herself, Nyala became fascinated with tracking, with following the subtlest of signs, and she alternates lyrical and philosophical descriptions of how she learned to look and what she learned to look for with a chillingly matter-of-fact account of her long battle to protect her children and herself. An arresting tale of courage and hard-won wisdom. Donna Seaman In this beautifully rendered narrative, a woman reveals the art of tracking both in the wilderness and in autobiography. Nyala became a professional tracker almost by chance. Having grown up in rural southern Mississippi, she saw her own track veer tragically off course when, at age 17, she dropped out of high school shortly before graduation to marry an abusive man. She had two children with him and many near-encounters with death before she decided, seven years later, to escape. But eluding her vicious ex-husband turned out to be even more difficult than getting up the courage to leave. Nyala and her children suddenly found themselves being tracked, and they learned to read the signs of their pursuer in the footprints around their house, in the sliding door left slightly ajar, in the neatly folded hand towels in the bathroom. They moved often, but one day Nyala's children disappeared, abducted by their father. While trying to regain custody, Nyala married a park ranger and began learning to track in earnest. She talks here about the process: finding the track, following its turns, walking alongside the person or animal you're trying to find. It's fascinating to watch her mark a lost person's footprint from among hundreds and to see her determinedly trace the progress of wandering hikers as they stray farther and farther from their goal. She tells of two tracking experiences in detail, and of the slow process of becoming a true tracker. And Nyala also tells how, in mastering this skill, she found her own true course again: She was reunited with her children, went back to college, and studied tracking at ever deeper levels among the Bushmen in Africa. The gripping chronicle of a tracker finding herself as she looks for others. (Book-of-the-Month/Quality Paperback Book Club selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Nyala nowhere says that she wanted to be a writer, but her habits of mind--a closeness of attention, a love of reading and a capa