MONTANA RECLUSE WROTE TO PEN PAL : UNABOMBER SUSPECT DESCRIBED LIFESTYLE.

Byline: James Brooke with David Barboza The New York Times

In a stream of meticulously handwritten letters to a Mexican farmhand he has never met, Theodore John Kaczynski, suspected of being the Unabomber, carried on a seven-year correspondence that provides the most detailed portrait yet of his reclusive life in the deep woods of Montana.

In a formal and carefully precise Spanish, ``Teodoro'' Kaczynski, as he signed the letters, wrote of his fascination with Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary, told of bandaging a cut foot by himself rather than visiting a doctor, and described scraping by in his mountain cabin with little money or food.

``I am fine here,'' he wrote Nov. 28, 1995. ``I am poorer than ever, but I am in very good health, and that is more important than anything. As to my poverty, I have $53.01 exactly, barely enough to stave off hunger this winter without hunting rabbits for their meat.

``But with the rabbit meat and a little flour and other things that I have put away, also a few dried vegetables from my little garden, I will get through the winter very well. And when the spring comes, perhaps I will have better luck with work and money, so that I can go to visit you. We will see.''

The correspondence appears to be the first evidence that Kaczynski maintained any sustained relationships in the years after he retreated to his isolated cabin in Montana, where, federal agents say, he continued to engage in his bombing campaign.

Kaczynski began the correspondence in 1988 with Juan Sanchez Arreola, a 68-year-old peasant from Chihuahua, after learning of him from his brother, David Kaczynski. David had met Sanchez in the early 1980s after buying property in the nearby Chalk Mountains of West Texas.

Sanchez showed The New York Times copies of two of some 50 letters he said had been sent to him by Kaczynski since 1988. He said he believed that he had thrown away or misplaced the rest of the correspondence.

On Tuesday federal law enforcement officials said they were aware of the correspondence because Sanchez's letters to Kaczynski had been found either at the Montana cabin or among the mail waiting to be delivered there.

But federal agents had not yet seen Kaczynski's letters to Sanchez because they had not located him.

In addition to the letters, Sanchez was sent a bright memento of their postal relationship: a wooden cylinder that Kaczynski had carefully carved, stained and painted. Mailed as a Christmas gift in 1994, the cylinder bears the motto: ``Montani Semper Liberi.''

Sanchez said Kaczynski's reclusive lifestyle apparently had strained relations with his family, who worried about his poverty and isolation.

He had asked David Kaczynski for money, Sanchez added.

``Teodoro had written him twice in the last year to ask for money, but not saying why,'' Sanchez said, referring to correspondence between Theodore and David Kaczynski. ``David first sent him $1,000, then $2,000.''

Last week's arrest of Kaczynski brought to an end a curious correspondence that linked Sanchez, a farm worker with two years of formal schooling, and Kaczynski, the brilliant mathematician who graduated from Harvard and taught at the University of California, Berkeley.

``We only knew each other through letters,'' the Mexican said, stunned to learn of the secret life linked to his correspondent. With television reception poor in this remote border town 150 miles southeast of El Paso, Texas, he said Tuesday that he rarely watched the news on his old black-and-white television set.

In a gradual role reversal over the years, the Mexican began the correspondence as supplicant but ended it as a psychological adviser.

In his first letter, in 1988, Sanchez asked Kaczynski for financial help; David Kaczynski had hired Sanchez for odd jobs in the desert mountains of West Texas. While hitchhiking from a job in New Mexico, Sanchez had broken his leg in a pickup truck accident.

In response, Kaczynski said he would try to help. The recluse, starting his 17th year in a one-room cabin, sounded lonely.

``I am very pleased that you call yourself my friend,'' he wrote in his first letter to Sanchez, dated Nov. 14, 1988.

Writing on the same kind of three-ring binder paper that the FBI now says he used for bomb-making notes, Kaczynski openly appealed for a friendship by mail, writing: ``And I, in turn, call myself your friend.''

By last fall, Sanchez, now a concerned friend of the Kaczynski family, wrote ``Teodoro'' to offer to send him $200 for the bus fare from Montana to here.

``I wanted to send him the money so he could see how other people live,'' said Sanchez, whose rough, thick fingers speak of a life of manual labor. Virtually as impoverished in financial terms as his North American pen pal, Sanchez said he enjoyed a rich family life - with a wife, three children and ``a bunch'' of grandchildren.

But, as had happened many times before, a vague response came in a familiar plain white envelope from Montana. The postage stamp, a red-white-and-blue rendering of Old Glory, was postmarked: ``Lincoln, MT Nov 30 1995.''

``When spring comes, maybe I will have better luck with a job and money so that I could go visit you,'' Kaczynski printed in a book-learned Spanish.

But before spring came to the Northern Rockies, as snow still blanketed the deep woods around his cabin, FBI agents arrested Kaczynski on April 3 after a minor scuffle. Next week, a grand jury is to be convened in Helena, Mont., to hear evidence against him on charges of possessing explosive devices.

Here, in Sanchez's house, on a nameless alley two blocks from a ``Rodeo Internacional,'' the aging farmhand unfolded his dusty reading glasses and read the latest letter he had received from his North American friend.

Addressed to ``my dear and appreciated friend,'' it described Kaczynski's poverty and gave a detailed, one-page exposition on the art of hunting snowshoe hares with a .22-caliber rifle.

Then, sketching a verbal picture of solitude, Kaczynski warned of a winter lapse in the correspondence. He would mail this letter, he wrote, then added: ``Afterwards, I probably will spend the rest of the winter without going to the village of Lincoln, and therefore will not visit my post office box until spring.''

Ending the ``Christmas greeting'' on a religious note, Kaczynski, baptized a Catholic, wrote to Sanchez, a practicing Catholic: ``May God bless you and all your family.''

Reflecting on the roughly 50 letters that he said he received from ``Teodoro'' over the past seven years, Sanchez said Kaczynski had never talked of trips from Montana or of the 1990 suicide of his father and namesake, Theodore R. Kaczynski. The letters never reflected an anarchist's hatred for a society shaped by high technology.

``He lived a very poor life - once he wrote that to travel, he would have to give up eating for a year,'' Sanchez, said, shaking his head in disbelief.

Rosa Sanchez, his wife, made a sound of disapproval, adding: ``In 1991, Teodoro wrote that he slipped and cut his foot on a can. He cured it himself, without seeing a doctor.''

Over the years, Sanchez, with his steel gray hair and settled family life, gained the status of an older adviser to the Kaczynski brothers.

David Kaczynski first came to the dry desert area around the Chalk Mountains of West Texas in the early 1980s. Wearing long hair and a beard, he lived for months at a time in a cellar hole, covered with sheets of metal roofing material.

In 1991, David Kaczynski, at age 40, married his high school sweetheart, Linda Patrik. The couple now lives in Schenectady, N.Y.