I’d wanted to take a rest but busied myself instead with finding a map. It turned out that the clerk was right. It was the Mississippi that ran behind the hotel. Its headwaters were in Northern Minnesota. From there it ran for a while almost parallel to the Canadian border and on through Lake Winnibigoshish, whereupon it succumbed to gravity and flowed south, past my hotel window. I usually have a little lie-down after a branch visit, but I was feeling refreshed, so I slid my suitcase in front of the closet, where it would remain standing for the most part unopened, took the elevator down again, and there it was, the Mississippi. Wide and mighty, and with a curiously tidy waterfall a little to the north. I gazed at the foaming water, and then I spotted a bridge with a rust-red railing. It was early dusk, the air was humid, and I could hear​ 44cicadas. When I got out to about the middle of the bridge, I positioned myself with my face to the north. Somewhere up there the Mississippi began, and I thought about the round-about path I’d seen the river take on the map. It was as if it couldn’t make up its mind at its origin, and then surrendered anyway to the immense downward route.

I’ve been so many places now that it doesn’t matter, I thought. Everything’s shifted, but when I was a kid, the best thing I knew was working with poultry. I stuck my hands in among them. Then I might steal the eggs and give them to Mom, until Mom decided to yield to her infections. Dad kept exotic pheasants for a while, and the silver pheasant was hotheaded and easy to tease. When I placed my boot soles up against the fence, it’d come straight over. Its powerful talons against my rubber boot, its beak in a vicious attack. One summer day, when I was walking around barefoot in the grass, I challenged the pheasant. I placed my naked foot against the chicken wire and shouted at it to bring it on. It did. It only wished me ill, but it felt like solicitude, and then I sat down by the wire netting. I gazed into its black eye. I told it that it had barely nipped me. I explained that its attack felt just like being tickled. That it was welcome to try again, it could just attack me, I said. “Attack me,” I said again and again, but it just stared back with its black eye, until it seemed to give up. Then it went away.