Hand To Hand

He held his newly completed flint knife blade up against the clear blue sky of the falling leaves time. The cutting edge looked good. He rubbed the blade between his brown and weathered fingers, feeling the lay of the fluted chipping with satisfaction.

After carefully rolling the blade in a soft deerskin to keep it in hiding until his grandson came of age, the old craftsman got up slowly from the ground…aware of the stiffness that had settled like a light, over-night snow on his bones. He gathered his things and he and the others walked on as they went about their daily rounds and yearly travels and the winds blew and the light and dark comings and goings of the suns and the thousands of seasons passed across the face of the land…the land that cradled a carefully crafted flint blade that was lost in the reddish dust…the dust that had mingled with the bones of the ancient ones in a land of mesquite trees and rattlesnakes…a land resonant with the silence of open spaces and saturated by centuries.

My father’s head came into view across the way. A small dark dot across the dry land that was crossed by the arroyas of forgotten rains. I returned my focus to the ground, to continue the familiar scanning for the occasional arrowheads found partially visible in the red dirt. My pocket already held some good finds. We always enjoyed our private, individual sharing of this quest for the remnants of the past. Each of us finding our own way across the land…seeing each other, off and on, across the landscape was all we needed to feel the special connection. That and the occasionally shared victory.

I looked again and he was waving his arm overhead, so I started over in his direction, scanning as I went, to see what he had found. When I got to him, he showed me a beautiful, flawless flint blade of a knife. The workmanship was superb. I was jealous and Dad was very pleased with himself for having found it.

He carefully laid out his arrowhead collection in a large frame that hung for years over my parents’ mantle. At the center of the arrowheads was the prize knife blade.

After Dad died, I brought them to my home. The frame was too big for my house so I had to re-arrange it all and put it in a smaller frame, but its centerpiece was left the same. It hangs on the wall next to my own collection of arrowheads and the flint knife blade looks over my shoulder as I write this. It probably knows that it will be handed down to my son and from him to his son and so it goes with the remnants of lives lived.