It takes him a week, maybe nine days,
he can’t remember now, moving upriver
all the while, and mapless, making
the judgments others before him had made—
meaning no tributary streams, no east, west,
south, or north forks, but the river itself—
and then the lake in the higher mountains
and the largest of its inlet streams,
the pond, the brook, the tule-thick tarn,
the rivulet and horsetail waterfall, all the way
to the man-sized final slab of melting ice
stoppered in the gash just north of the peak
that goes by the same name as the river,
from which he calls hello, hello to the rain.