Ranger

The upper right central incisor was chipped.

Not a clean break.

A diagonal chip off the corner that had worn smooth over many years, the kind of chip that had been there for decades without being repaired.

The chip took off about a quarter of the tooth.

It was specific.

It was not a common chip.

I knew that chip.

My father had a friend named Dale Riley.

Dale grew up in the same small town where I grew up.

He was four years younger than my father.

They fished together.

They hunted together.

Dale was at our house for dinner, maybe once a month when I was a kid.

He was a big-shouldered man with a soft voice, and he had a chip in his upper right central incisor that he had gotten in a bar fight outside of a tavern on Main Street in the summer of 1984.

I know the story of that chip because my father told it to me maybe 30 times growing up.

Dale had hit a man named Benji Olstadt who had made a comment about a woman Dale was with, and Benji had hit him back with a beer bottle that had caught the corner of Dale's tooth.

My father always said Dale could have gotten the tooth fixed, but that he kept it because it reminded him to think before he threw a punch.

Dale Riley went missing on September 14, 1997.

He had gone up alone to hunt elk in the upper drainages of our district.

He had told his wife he'd be back on the 17th.