We never showed the blade to either of our parents. The Mom-thing would have taken it away for fear we’d harm ourselves, we thought, and Dad would have wanted to sell it as a rarity.It had come a long way and both of us knew it. Terrell, ordinarily no scholar, went to the library and boned up. The stone might have come from volcanoes out west, the Sierra Nevada or Medicine Lake. Points and blades like the one we had found were traded by Indians all over the continent. But Terrell liked to think ours came from South America. Had maybe been used, on top of some Aztec ziggurat, to carve out a living, beating human heart.Terrell carved a handle from a stub of deer antler he’d squirreled up in the loft above the garage since he’d found it in the woods a year or so before. At the library he looked up diagrams that showed how the Indians had set about it. He was a long time filing a tight notch in the yellowed bone, and binding blade to shaft with strings of fresh, wet hog gut. I watched him, studied him while he worked.
