BRADENTON, Florida — Displaying the composure of an escape artist, 13-year-old Clay Moore used a safety pin from his ripped school uniform jacket to pick away at the duct tape binding his wrists and free himself after a gunman kidnapped him and left him deep in thick woods 20 miles from home.Moore ‘s mother and stepfather do not even want to think about what might have happened if they had not made Clay repair his torn jacket instead of buying him a new one.

Clay managed to walk away hours after he was taken. He found a farmworker in a field and called his stepfather, Steve Kelle, from the man’s phone, “as calm as if he was calling from a friend’s house,” Kelle said yesterday.

Clay’s mother, Traci Kelle, recalled getting the call notifying her that Clay had been snatched. Witnesses said he was standing closest to where the abductor stopped his pickup truck.

“I can’t put into words how absolutely horrifying it was when we received the news,” she said. “But I have to say when I got this phone call (that he was safe), it was the best thing that ever happened in my life.”

Clay was abducted at his bus stop in Parrish, 40 miles south of Tampa, last Friday morning by a man authorities believe was 22-year-old Vicente Ignacio Beltran-Moreno, a native of Mexico. He is wanted on local warrants alleging armed kidnapping and aggravated assault and a federal warrant charging unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

Kelle, Clay’s stepfather, said the boy told him he was nervously playing with the pin in the kidnapper’s truck and put it in his mouth because “he just thought it would be helpful.”

The gunman took the arts school student to a remote, wooded area, tied him up, stuck a sock in his mouth and left him.

Clay spit out the sock and the pin, and used a stick and his mouth to retrieve the fastener from the ground, Kelle said. He picked at the duct tape binding his wrists until he could get them loose.

“We are truly proud of Clay,” Kelle said, standing next to the diminutive teen at a news conference. “He did an incredible job on his own. He kept his head about him.”

Clay did not speak to reporters and did not appear too rattled by the dozen or so TV cameras. At one point as his stepfather spoke, the teen sat and held hands with his mother.

Manatee County Sheriff Charlie Wells said his agency is working with the FBI and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to track down Beltran-Moreno, who became the suspect after investigators took an artist’s sketch of Clay’s abductor to the migrant worker camps east of Bradenton. Several migrants said it was Beltran-Moreno, a former farmworker who still had many friends in the camps.