The backpack suited her physically, being small and light, but it was large enough to hold a small camera and two lenses, good enough for her budding love with camera and film. It was still dark and Sara stumbled several times as they hiked along the winding trail toward the top of the mountain.

“Are you all right?” called Uncle Marc softly.

“Umhmm,” replied Sara. “I just tripped on a small rock,” she added.

“Would you like to stop and rest?” asked Uncle Marc.

“No, let’s just keep going. I’m fine, really.”

Sara knew her uncle always pushed to make these trips challenging for her, and she didn’t want to disappoint him by wimping out.

The backpack dug into her back slightly, and she shrugged and moved her shoulders about trying to adjust the strain of the straps. It was getting lighter to the east, and Uncle Marc said it wasn’t too much farther.

Marc Jordan was a lean man, and tall for his weight, 6’2” and 140 lbs. He was Sara’s mother’s brother, and unlike her mom a very quiet person with little to say most of the time. Not that he wasn’t thoughtful, which he was, but he kept his thoughts pretty much to himself, except with Sara.

He was an artist at heart, though he was a trained veterinarian, and with Sara he was transformed into a wonderful talker, full of stories about nature and the wonderful places he’d been in his travels.

As a young boy Marc’s love of life and living things drew him always to animals, and he’d had a veritable zoo of animals he cared for while growing up.

One day while running he found an injured Peregrine falcon out near the power lines that ran across the Henderson’s field, and brought it carefully to the veterinary school at the university.

That pretty much set his path toward veterinary medicine.

Marc was an introvert as a child, and was alone much of his youth. His parents, understanding his love of silence and encouraging his exploration of that vast inner world, gave him his first camera to explore the outer world in some inner way. This was something Sara understood very well.

Marc spent long days as a teen exploring the woods and the wildlife refuge near his home. He loved to compose poetry, mostly in his mind’s eye, about his friends in the woods, the enigmatic and elusive wind, or about a wing feather he’d found high in a mountain pass.

He had other interests, but by choice spent most of his time outside of school behind the lens of his camera pursuing his love of life. In the process he captured birds and animals on film in their natural habitat. He experimented a little with various types of film, but eventually settled on a preference for black and white, feeling that color intruded and drew attention away from what was important in the subject, its character, its essence, its nature.

Uncle Marc spent most of his vacations and trips with his fiancée, traveling to exotic places, spending time together in the wilds of nature, but on occasion he invited Sara to go with him on one of his solo photo journeys. Together they would travel in the middle of the night to some place he had discovered in his many ventures, and they would spend several days at that location exploring, talking little, and taking photographs of what was there.

Usually what was there was pretty impressive, like Half Dome towering over Yosemite Valley, or the toufous rising mysteriously out of Mono Lake like some latter-day apparition, or a velveteen glade blanketed with spring flowers high above Tuolumne Meadows.

Wherever they were, the air smelled as it must have when the world was newborn and an age apart – it was so refreshing.

Each day, with every expansive view and every precious magical moment, the skies just over the horizon took on that elegant and otherworldly quality just before sunrise and around twilight. It never failed that Sara was mesmerized with the colors and the sense of timelessness in these moments.

Uncle Marc said he picked these times of day because of this. When he said it spoke to him of something ancient, Sara nodded her head in agreement and mutual understanding, though she wouldn’t have been able to put any of this into words if asked directly, it was more a knowing. That was why she loved being with Uncle Marc. They understood each other without needing any explanations.

The sun had set with its usual palette of splendor, and Sara watched enraptured. The evening’s unfolding celestial display this time, though, was a mixture of mystery and the black of night, with the North Star shining as a beacon in the sheer darkness of the heavens.

The ancient bristlecone pine, just feet away from where Sara and her uncle sat, had stood defiantly against the fierce cold winds over a hundred-fold generations, as a sentinel clutching to the granite outcropping, as wind-whipped and barren, the mountain top nestled amidst the glorious star cover.

Spirits of the nether worlds moved silently about the granite expanse surrounding them, the mountaintop being the playing fields of the gods.

Uncle Marc earlier had set his tripod about ten yards away from where they had placed their sleeping bags, pointed the camera skyward along an axis he had researched prior to this trip, and set his camera for a long-time exposure to capture star tracks. He tripped the shutter when it was dark enough, and told Sara that he had a surprise for her with this one.

“I can’t wait to see it, Uncle Marc.”

The night was still, and the silence as deep as the heavens were dark. Sara could hardly stand it, she was so excited. She nestled deeper into her alpine sleeping bag and pulled it tightly around her. As she gazed up at the heavens, she heard the pure silence on the mountaintop, her breathing an almost unnoticed undercurrent in the backdrop of her mind, punctuated by the ongoing rhythmic beating of her heart.

“Do you hear it?” she asked her uncle.

“I do, Sara,” he replied. He pointed to a bright star shining in the quadrant just to the south of zenith, and said that it was the prime star in the constellation Diana. Her bow, poised on the bounds of midnight and ether and bent to the point of breaking, sent its feathered beam flaming across the skies and time, and eternity seemed to stand still.

Sara smiled, for her middle name was Diana, after her grandmother. “Goddess of the hunt,” she murmured under her breath.

“Umhmm,” murmured her uncle in return.

Sara opened her eyes, and had an uneasy feeling. It was pitch dark, and she thought maybe it was around 2:00 in the morning. She sat up, still clutching her sleeping bag around her, and looked over to where Uncle Marc lay. The uneasy feeling heightened as she noticed that he was not in his sleeping bag; in fact, he was nowhere to be seen.

She turned, and looked over the surrounding area, finding only his equipment and belongings in a neat pile where he’d left them earlier in the day, and panic set in and she began to be afraid.

“Uncle Marc!” she called out, her voice breaking. The sound of her voice faded into the surrounding space, and into the silence of the dark. She called out again, “Uncle Marc!”

Where was he? What happened? And then she began to cry.

Sara sat huddled in the dark, her eyes still moist. She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting up, the sleeping bag still pulled around her. The wind was a mere whisper and the night skies stark and clear. Sara looked over her shoulder beyond the bristlecone pine, and in the dimness of night her eyes fell on Uncle Marc’s camera and tripod, still sitting where he had set them for the timed exposure.

Strange, she thought, Uncle Marc was gone, but everything else seemed the same. She got up, and still clutching her sleeping bag around her, hobbled over to Uncle Marc’s camera. It was still pointed heavenward, but the time had elapsed, the photograph had been taken. Uncle Marc had said it was focused on a point just off the North Star.

Sara sat down next to the tripod, and started to cry once again, her soft sobbing swallowed in the expanse of space encompassing the exposed granite under the star cover.

“Uncle Marc wouldn’t leave me behind,” she insisted half to herself; “He wouldn’t!” She told herself to get a grip, and wiped her eyes on the edge of her sleeping bag. She stood up, and came around the camera on its tripod.

“What was Uncle Marc shooting?” wondered Sara. She dropped her sleeping bag and stooped down, put her hands on her knees, and craned her neck to look up through the viewfinder. Standing thus, she put her one eye up to the eyepiece and closed the other.

The heavens were blacker than Sara had ever seen. The night sky seemed compressed, as though squeezed into the frame of the camera’s viewfinder. The brilliance of the stars surprised Sara, and she blinked her eye. Spectral colors flashed across the viewfinder screen, and Sara became aware of something just below the level of conscious thought, below the level of sensation.

She watched in fascination as the colors moved into sounds, but sounds registered through her eyes in expansive and explosive colors. Sara didn’t know what was happening, or how, but she heard the colors as they moved across the spectrum of visible light, and her eyes misted up, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

She caught her breath, and watched as the heavens burst in flashes of color, and thunder rolled in low rumbling sounds across the field of her vision. And throughout all this, there was an accompanying silence that cradled what was transpiring in the viewfinder. Her ears, exposed to the windswept and barren granite shelf, heard nothing. It was her eyes that heard everything.

Then, to one side of the viewfinder a sliver of darkness edged into her field of vision. At first it was virtually lost amidst the flashes of color and thunder, hidden from her conscious mind. The darkness grew steadily until it was a distinct patch running in a diagonal across one expanse of the heavens, by degrees from southeast to north-by-northwest.

Its presence increased, its darkness colder than the outer reaches of time itself, its hue that of pitch in the dead of a moonless night. Sara shuddered, and blinked her one eye, but the darkness remained, and its weight pressed in on her and took her breath away.

Sara was suddenly aware of a disturbance in the stillness surrounding her on the bare expanse of granite, and she straightened up and looked around. Uncle Marc stood next to her, his hands in the pockets of his down parka, his steel-grey eyes glowing, a smile on his lips.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you, Sara,” he whispered, a hint of regret in his voice. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk over by the canyon rim. I heard you call, and now I’m here.”

Sara held his gaze, and smiled in return. “I was scared at first. Then, I knew you wouldn’t leave me. It’s all so strange, Uncle Marc. After a while I didn’t feel afraid. I was more curious about what you were getting on film.”

Uncle Marc smiled, and reached out his hand and rested it gently on Sara’s shoulder. “What do you see?” he asked, his eyes glowing in the darkness.

“I’m not sure, Uncle Marc. It’s all so beautiful, but it’s really different and weird,” she answered, searching for words to describe what she’d been seeing. “I feel like I’m hearing with my eyes. How is that happening?”

Uncle Marc smiled, and held her eyes. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “That happens to me sometimes, too. I don’t have an explanation for it at all, and it doesn’t happen all the time.”

He was silent for another moment. “I think it must happen when you are no longer aware of yourself, and personal things don’t get in the way of seeing what’s going on around you. It must be like the Hindu monks who let go of everything in this world in order to experience that they are one with the world. Even giving words to that seems a violation,” he said thoughtfully.

Sara waited, now aware of how slowly her heart was beating. “Do you think everyone feels this?” asked Sara finally.

“I don’t think so, honey. Not that they couldn’t, but I think people tend to get caught up in how fast things are going on around them and try to keep up. A place like this slows things down a whole lot. There’s not a lot here between you and where we are. Do you feel it?”

Sara nodded in the dark, and an “…umhmm,” escaped her lips. “Do we have to go back?” Sara asked just above a whisper.

Uncle Marc didn’t answer for a while. “I think so, Sara. But let’s see if we can take this place back with us…”