I laid the knife on the bench, made myself keep my voice easy, and looked that man in the eye, and I asked him, gentle, if he could tell me anything about the fella he bought it from at that gun show.
He tried. A table dealer, he said, out of the western part of the state, the kind who buys whole collections and moves them on. He gave me what he had, which was more than nothing. He had no idea he had just laid my boy Jakes knife on my counter, eight years after Jake drove into the high country and neither he nor his truck ever came down.
I did not tell him all of it. I thanked him, fixed the knife, and then I sat a long time with my sons stamped number under my thumb, that little mark I set myself so it could always be proven his.
The next day I took it to the sheriff and to the search and rescue folks who had combed those mountains for a month eight years back and found nothing. They remembered Jake. In a town like Cody, you do not forget a boy who vanishes.
They traced the knife the way you trace anything, one careful owner at a time, back through the dealer to a collection, and the collection to a man who did some rough scavenging up in the high country. He had come across a truck, years ago, far off any road, down in a ravine where the search had never reached, and instead of reporting it he had stripped what was worth money and left the rest.
Search and rescue went back up with the coordinates that man finally gave them. And down in that ravine, under eight years of brush and snowmelt, they found my son.
It was an accident. The road gave way in the dark, the way mountain roads do, and Jake went off where no one would ever think to look. There was no villain in it, only a man who found him after and chose money over a phone call, and the law dealt with that man for what he did.
Eight years I did not know if my boy was alive or gone, wandering or waiting. That not knowing is its own kind of dying, I said once, and it is. But it ended. We brought Jake home. We buried him on a clear day with half the county there, because half the county had looked for him once.
His little boy is grown enough now to carry a pocketknife. I cleaned Jakes up, sharpened it proper, and I gave it to him with the story of the number stamped in the bolster. Eight years my son was a question in the mountains. Now he is home, and his knife is in his own sons pocket, where it belongs.