"The Lost Knife" by R.N. Friedland of Victoria, British Columbia Canada

The knife, the knife was lost. How was this noticed? When I emptied my pockets. It must have dropped when I pulled out my keys. I hoped that I'd left it in my other pants, I'd done that several times over the years. Or that I'd left it on my desk, or on my dresser. But I had a sick feeling, like that certain nausea you try to resist when you have had too much wine, that it wasn't going to be found in any of those places and that this time I had finally and really lost it.

The knife was a Sabre brand, with a bone handle, brown and yellow, yellowed and browned even more with age, a burl on the metal blade case as if it had been creased by a bullet, or a hot torch. There was a tip broken from the longer blade, I had done that, using it for what a knife should not have been used for. Both blades were now greyed, darkened, with age, looser in the handle than before, not sharpened as before. I had less need for a sharpened knife. I had sold my stone along with my sheath knife, my rifle - the Mohawk 600, a .243 Winchester with a Williams military peep sight, and my pistol, the trim black double-action automatic I had never had to use. I had sold them in Edmonton, at Klondike Arms, to buy groceries for Joan and the kids in 1980, when things were tight, and because I was afraid of what I might do with them if I didn't sell them. I kept the blades sharp for a while, using the kitchen washer-sharpener that scraped the metal, and anyone who knew anything about knives, knew you weren't respecting the blade if you sharpened it that way. I used it less and less, and sharpened it less and less often, but I carried it in my pants pocket every day. I guess I must have carried it for 15 years.

I had found the knife when I was cleaning a fish. A big trout. I didn't know how big then, until I lived where they do not have big trout and heard people bragging about four pounders. I told a few about how you could always go to Grey Reef, near Casper, and catch a six to eight pound rainbow. They laughed as if it was just a fish story. So I stopped telling people, but I remember Wyoming and the North Platte and the big rainbows.

I was cleaning a big fish on that bank and shoal of time, it must have been between '76 and '78 when I was working for the State, up in Casper. It was a good place to fish, and to clean fish. I would have had my own knife with me, but I can't remember anything about that knife. Maybe it was the red handled folding Henckels I'd bought for antelope. It could have been. The Henckels was really too big to carry in my pocket, and too big for fish. It would have been natural to put it away in a drawer and carry the Sabre instead. No, I think it must have been the cheap pocket knife that the Beyer's had given me in Laramie that first Christmas. They said every man in the West had to have a pocket knife. Yes, that's right. I can scarcely remember it now. The blades had loosened up right away, and one had snapped off altogether. Sure, I must have discarded it after I found the Sabre.

Anyway, I was cleaning this big trout. I'd pulled out the insides and tossed them on the shore for the mink. Then, as I rinsed the fish in the cold calm water, I'd removed the black stuff along the spine with the fingernail of my index finger, scraping it backwards towards the tail, the way Driscoll had shown me when we were covering the State out of Cheyenne.

The sand near Grey Reef was black and grainy and gritty. I could hear it scratch at the blade as I slid it into the sand so I could wash my hands. Then, when I had put my knife away, I saw the other knife, propped in the sand at the same angle. For an instant, I thought I had forgotten to put my own knife away. Its easy to fool yourself that way.

I couldn't tell how long it had been there. The other fisherman might have just walked away. It could have been standing there for hours or for months. I couldn't tell. Yet somehow, you look around. But there's no one else there. I didn't see anyone when I came in. I didn't see any one when I went out. I could have left it there, but I didn't. I called out, "Hello. Hello." but no one answered. My voice sounded small and alone where the river widened. The sun was setting. I felt a chill.

I picked it up. For the first time I noticed the burl in the back of the blade mechanism, as if the metal had melted and started to flow. It formed a shallow depression about one quarter of the way down the back of the knife, but it did not impede the movement of the blades. How could that have happened, a manufacturing flaw? It doesn't seem likely. Sabre would have better quality control than that. A bullet crease? I resist this conclusion. It seems unlikely that a small knife could have been hit by a bullet at such an angle by accident, unless the shot was fired deliberately to create just such an effect. I know men who do that, Zelig had had us shoot holes in his visored cap so he could tell women that he'd been shot at in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs, when, in fact, he had been no where near Cuba. We shot holes in that hat until it was torn to shit, until he couldn't use it. But somehow I knew this knife wasn't like that. It seemed more likely that the owner was a welder, it looked more like the blade case had melted in a small spot. I figured it was either a welding wound, or an electrical accident. I would never know. And finally, it didn't matter, although men always commented about the wounded steel, and wondered.

I would have put the big fish in the foam cooler, and rushed it home to Joan and the kids, there must have been four then, Amos, Eli, Hadley and Jess. We'd have cooked it right away for dinner, and eaten it. It was such a commonplace event. We never took pictures.

But you know, I never really thought that the knife was mine. I always believed that it still belonged to the other fisherman, and that one day I might meet him and give it back. In the meantime I kept faith by carrying it. Besides, it was always a great story to tell when you had a few drinks with people. Men would nod, and not say much, or say that that was great, and they would know why it was a good way to find a knife, and why you kept it, and carried it. Women did not really understand, and you felt a little foolish after you'd told them. They thought it had to do with luck, that you carried it for luck. And while I knew that wasn't it, hadn't I felt that I'd lost my luck when I lost it? How lucky had it been really?

I had carried it through three States, two Provinces, two marriages with seven children, a dozen jobs, a dozen moves, cutting tape to pack boxes, cutting tape to unpack boxes, lung surgery, law school, the articles at Swinton, and this last time to the Anaham Indian Reserve, a hundred kilometers west of Williams Lake. There had been the Chinese woman that I had loved more than any of the others, and the other women that I had loved. My mother had died during the time that I carried the knife. She had refused to speak to me for two years before she died because of Joan and the kids. I had lost the 1988 election while I carried the knife. What kind of luck was that?

Well then, I had lost it, and I felt that loss like the death of a close friend, or a part of myself. It nagged at me. Why should I feel this sense of loss, when I had lost so much more than a mere pocket knife over the years. You could probably buy a better blade today for thirty dollars. That the knife had come to mean more to me than just two folding blades between brown bone was evident. It was as if the loss of that knife knelled to me my own mortality with the absolute and certain and inevitable toll that I, too, must surely someday die, that I, too, must lose everything.

On the other hand, I can hear the voice of my first wife saying, "That's just the way you are. You don't feel anything for people." Even in my imagination her criticism stings me. 'Is it true?' I wonder. I always thought that I felt too much, that inside there was always only pain. Who can you tell that to?

I remember that my father had a knife: a pearl handled, chrome bladed promotional award for selling several thousand cases of a certain brand of whiskey. We were fishing on a bank or shoal of time called the fifties, when a storm came up. We had rented a slow heavy wooden rowboat from Scotty in Point Lookout, on Long Island. My father had a 7 horsepower Scott Atwater motor that he kept with Scotty. They used to set the motor in a big drum of fresh water to run the salt out after we'd been out fishing for the day, to keep the insides of the engine from corroding.

My dad had left his knife in the sand. The grass on that grassy spit of sand was being whipped flat by the wind. He noticed right away that he had left the knife, but we couldn't go back.

It must have meant more to him than I knew. What could a boy know about loss. At that point in time, I had not yet written a cheque, or loved a woman, or caught a fish. My dad wrote a letter to the president of the distillery. This was in the early 1950's. I remember that I was already cynical enough to think that it was pointless. To my surprise, he got a personal letter from that president. He sent my dad his own knife, explaining that there were no others left. My dad would have been in his mid-thirties. I was forty-three when I lost my knife. Had my father been feeling this same sense of loss? Had that loss touched the heart of the president of a distillery? He's the one who was in the papers for pushing his wife out of a window in Montreal. I think to myself that men are funny beasts, capable of great savagery and small kindnesses. How will women ever understand us?

An old Indian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Oldbright, came to see me about a legal issue. Someone had stolen a rifle from their friend's truck while it was parked in Alexis Creek. The R.C.M.P. were not, according to the Oldbright's, looking diligently for the thief. I mentioned a few alternatives, that I could check the status of the complaint with the R.C.M.P., and that their friend could bring in her insurance policy and we could see if the loss was covered. The Oldbright's were an older couple, maybe in their 60's. The old woman's face was lined and leathery, and when she smiled, her smile appeared amplified by the many concentric folds of her expressive face. She was laughing now, "Did you lose something, too?" she asked me.

I knew that she had found the knife. "Yes. Yes. A Sabre pocket knife." She laughed, reaching into a pocket, "It is rusted. It was in the mud. I didn't want to pull it out while we were talking and have you think I was just an Indian pulling a knife on you."

We all laughed. I told them the story of how I had found it. I noticed that they lost interest about half way through. They think about property differently than we do. To them there is no significance in finding a knife, or in it having belonged to someone else. They were bored. I did not finish the story. I thanked them.

When they had gone, I looked at the knife. It was crusted over with gritty mud. I had dropped it just outside the door to the office. It had become imbedded in the mud over the weekend. I opened the blades, and was surprised to see that yellow-red rust had spotted the blades and the case. In all the years I had carried it, the blades had not rusted. Why had they rusted now? Was the wet soil of the Chilcotin especially corrosive? Or must being buried lead to this.

I washed the knife and dried the blades, wiping the surface rust off with a paper towel. The rust transferred a rust-yellow double image of the blades to the bleached white pulpy fabric. I could feel my face forming the first part of a smile. There had not been time for the rust to penetrate deeply into the steel.