A SPECIAL TRIP, A SPECIAL BOOK; AUTHOR ENTERTAINS WITH TALES OF TREK.

Byline: Rich Martin Special to the Daily News

There are outdoor tales about macho heroes overcoming obstacles with strength and force of will. Of manly men who, like knights of old, conquer every enemy, stun the world and carry off the prize.

Delightfully, ``A Walk in the Woods'' (Broadway Books, $25) by renowned journalist and author Bill Bryson isn't one of those.

Bryson, who worked for newspapers in the United Kingdom for 20 years and sought to reacquaint himself with his native country through a hike on the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trial, is like the best kind of professor. A skillful and comedic communicator, he keeps readers engaged by describing with far-ranging, ribald and often hard-edged humor a trek that in many things went as wrong as it went right.

The New Hampshire outdoorsman uses levity to spice up even such mundane matters as buying equipment. But it is his discussions about the people he encounters that shine the brightest.

The 276 pages read like a novel, with two interesting protagonists, colorful minor characters and great dialogue. The traveling pair meet Chicken John, famous for getting lost. And Bryson tells the secondhand stories of some of the folks who have traversed the AT: a trekker in his 80s, another on crutches, a blind man with a seeing-eye dog who reportedly fell about 5,000 times and a 350-pound wafflestomper who lost 53 pounds on his sojourn.

Bryson's companion, Stephen Katz, is a piece of work himself. A recovering alcoholic and not the fittest of men, he started the pathway in Georgia with a gigantic pack crammed with junk food and threw pounds of it away the first day. Unfortunately, this included many staples, too.

But the hike isn't all laughs. Bryson's serious comments about appreciation of the outdoors, conservation and problems with the trail itself are all the more effective because he is not a nature purist. He's an ordinary fellow who took an extraordinary journey.

A few days into it he wrote, ``The central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things . . . fill you with wonder and gratitude.''

Though he skipped parts of the trail and therefore didn't finish it, Bryson - who has the ability to give serious tones to funny matters - ``enjoyed the escape from civilization and ached for its comforts.'' Our rating: Four Stars.

From the outset, it's easy to figure out where ``In Praise of Wild Trout'' (The Lyons Press, $20) is headed: The 94 pages compose another conservation-minded work that will end up talking about deteriorating habitat, conservation, our sacred trust, etc.

To its credit, however, the essays penned by eight contributors - good writers all - often are as unpredictable as the fish themselves and the preaching is kept to a minimum.

The main thrust of many of the articles is the virtues of wild and natural trout compared with the stocked, hatchery variety, but the passages range as far as the waters they explore. Some focus on personal angling experiences, others are more dry and scientific.

Planted trout ``strike a fly with desperate fury, turn quickly if they miss and strike it again even harder, as if from an impulse that is homicidal and suicidal at the same time,'' writes W.D. Wetherell. Wild trout, on the other hand, show ``not that greedy boardinghouse grab, but a delicate kind of aristocratic plucking.''

The attraction is not just the act of fishing but the places where it's done. Datus C. Proper writes of one particularly flat, brown, treeless, wind-blown site: It's ``the kind of place where one good, drunken country-western tune on the car radio could permanently break your heart.''

Hunter and angler Christopher Camuto expresses how he deals with death in the wilderness, since ``catch-and-release fishing is an ecological necessity, not my preference.'' Gutting fish reminds him ``that you cannot really undo what you've done in life, or let the consequences or your life simply swim away, as if nothing had happened.'' Killing a trout, he writes, is ``as strange and serious an act'' as shooting a deer or grouse.

All in all, the group work edited and with a foreword by acclaimed New York fly-fisherman Nick Lyons make for a nice collection of mostly enjoyable essays that will appeal to many avid anglers. Our rating: Three Stars.

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PHOTO (Color) A couple of worthwhile new outdoors titles include a look at the Appalachian Trail and trout conservation.

Gus Ruelas/Daily News