Apache lore comes to life in Fergus's captivating 'Wild Girl'

The truth is that there was an Apache girl who was thrown into a Chihuahua jail cell. The truth is that there was, around the same time, in 1932, a joint Mexican-American expedition arranged to rescue the young son of a Mexican rancher from the Apaches who had kidnapped him.

What Fergus, who also wrote ''One Thousand White Women," has created are a young Chicagoan, Ned Giles, and his notebooks. Giles joins the Great Apache Expedition that will trade the Apache girl for the Mexican boy to photograph the trip for the Douglas, Ariz., Daily News. The first photograph he takes, of the girl naked and curled up on the floor in her jail cell, haunts him.

Fergus presents a motley crew of characters who have signed on to the expedition: a group of wealthy dilettantes and their servants, Americanized Indian scouts, Arizona lawmen, some Mexicans, and one female anthropologist.

He includes plenty of Apache lore, as the Americans move farther into the mountains and closer to the Indians. Apaches never attack at night, he writes, ''because a man's ghost will get lonely and attach itself to whoever killed him." But they attack plenty during the daylight hours, and as the Americans and Mexicans drop out of the expedition, those remaining find themselves in serious danger.

Not all the Americans in the story are bad, and not all the Apaches are good. While some of the Indians try torturing some expedition members in a most colorful way, others have fallen in love with the Americans. But talk about cultural mismatches: Ned reluctantly agrees that he and the Indian girl could not live in each other's worlds because, he imagines, ''in mine she curled up in a fetal position and starved herself to death, and in hers I was stoned to death by savage women at dawn." Meanwhile, we begin to believe Ned's journal so completely that we are surprised not to find a photo section in the center of the book.

The author lives in Montana and southern Arizona and writes knowledgeably of the canyons, arroyos, and hidden valleys of the Sierra Madre, as well as that elusive band of Apaches who live in the caves of the mountains: ''As is their way, they seemed to have once again vanished off the face of the earth, absorbed like the spirits of the dead," into those mountains. At the end of the novel, he offers his apologies to the Apache people for his presumptuousness in trying to portray Indian history and culture. As a ''White Eyes" (Apaches' scleras are coffee-colored), Fergus says, it is impossible ''to fully comprehend, let alone represent, the Native American experience and life-way." He's certainly done a better job, though, than most of us White Eyes could.