The Heart of the Hunter, by Laurens van der Post. New York: Harvest/HBJ. $ 4.95

Here the prolific South African author sensitively explores the imagination and emotion of the bushman in his exhausting physical and spiritual hunt for a place of his own. This book, first published in 1961, continues a story begun in "The Lost World of the Kalahari," which recorded van der Post's discovery, with a BBC television crew, of two branches of ancient peoples, describing their way of life, their art, music, and dance. What is the bushman's place today? Van der Post tries to answer that question with "The Heart of the Hunter." Blending his own observations with the lore of this ancient people, he argues persuasively that 20th-century man should help the bushman survive instead of destroying him.