Returning Recursive values -

I know this might be a simple recursion question to some of you but I'm just a beginner to VB and to the whole programming world so please bear with me if my question seems a little bit dumb....
Lets say you have a search tree structure and you want to traverse the the tree to get a value in that tree. Here's the algorithm:

Public Function Traverse(Level as integer) as String
If the level you reach doesn't equal 0 then
Branch.Traverse (Level - 1)
End if
Traverse = Node
End function

And if I call this function from another class it always returns the root cause the calling class can't "see" the lower levels of recursion. For example, say I want a node from level 5, each time the program reaches the "Traverse = Node" line when the recursion starts exiting, the variable is always updated with the previous level such as level 4, level 3, level 2, level 1. Level 5 is always written over by the previous level so when the recursion ends, I'm left with the level 1 data but I really wanted the level 5 data. In other words, how do I preserve the level 5 data so that the calling function can "see" it? Thanks