The Hole in the Sky (Patreon)

I never really wanted to go hunting anyway, I decided as I eased the big SUV over Perdition Ridge. Doc Abrough in the shotgun seat and I just sat there looking for a moment as I idled the too powerful engine. But then, hunting wasn't the real reason for these trips.

Despite the camping and hunting gear loaded in behind the four seats, the real reason for this particular trip lay in the lightweight luggage strapped to the roof of the vehicle. I glanced up then looked down again at the scenery.

Below us, Lost Frenchman Valley spread out, six miles wide and two miles across. At the lower end, furthest from us, the little river piled up against some rocks and made Cameo Lake. No one could have called the pretty little lake anything else.

Here on the ridge, cedars and lodgepole pine whispered and fussed on either side of us. Further down, a mixed forest of aspen, beech, maple and assorted evergreens waved and rolled like a green ocean. Rocky islands poked through here and there, some of them forcing the river to go around them. The blue-black flanks of Mount Pell rose to purple heights on the far side of the valley, the lingering white snowcap out of sight in a cloudy crown.

I wanted to shut off the engine and roll down the windows--there had to be birdsong out there; such scenery demanded a soundtrack.

The General stuck his head over my shoulder and barked out a question, "Where the hell is this lodge?" He smelled of Old Spice and gun oil, not exactly unpleasant which is more than I could say about the General himself.

I frowned but pointed out the line of rocks defining the near edge of a meadow just this side of the river. "It's a cabin, not a lodge," I told him for the fiftieth time. "You can't see it from here, too many trees." At one point, a blanket of yellow wildflowers drooped over the ledge. "See the flowers? The track to the cabin is just to the left of them."

"Flowers?" snorted the General.

"I see 'em," put in Senator Dunn from behind Doc. "Golly. That's sure a pretty sight." Dunn pointed over Doc's shoulder. "You reckon this Jeep can get us up that narrow track?"

"I thought there was a road," said the General as if the road were absent without leave.

"It's not a Jeep," put in Doc. Well, it wasn't. The General had insisted on renting us a top of the line luxury 4x4 with, of all things, a Lincoln nameplate and an extended bed that held a heck of a lot of supplies. He might have been right; certainly the food, clothing, supplies and equipment for the four of us would have overloaded any Jeep I had ever seen.

"You gonna get us an elk, son?" the General asked, practically growling in my ear.

"Not today," I told him as I put the big silvery truck back into a low gear. "It'll take us most of an hour to get to the cabin, then we should unpack, get settled and have some grub. By that time, it'll be dark. We can get an early start in the morning."

"An hour!" the General yelped. But he sat back and tried to squint toward the sun. "It can't take us an hour to get to that meadow."

"Every bit of forty minutes. I've done this before. There's no road, just that old logging track. I'm hoping this beast isn't too wide to go between some of the trees."

"You wouldn't let me rent us a Hummer," the General accused.

I sighed. He'd really had his heart set on a Humvee, and not one of the smaller ones, either but the civilian model of the real thing, six feet wide and seven feet tall.

"Golly, Hatton," said Dunn. "He said he didn't know if this truck could make it. Why would he want one of those Hummer things?" Dunn's aw-shucks routine didn't mean he was a complete fool, I figured him to be needling the General on purpose. Having spent the last two hours in the backseat together they were almost at the stage of drawing a line down the middle.

"The Hummer is built for rough terrain," said the General.

"This ain't the Mojave. Lookit all these trees."

"Anything it can't go around or over can be moved with the built-in winch," said the General.

"Can it about the goldurn Hummer, Hatton," Dunn said.

I caught Doc Abrough grinning out of the corner of my eye while the Bobbsey Twins made nice behind us. I appreciated Doc's forbearance, Dunn and Hatton had each spent three hours riding shotgun earlier today. "Just drive, Pete," Doc said, still grinning.

I shook my head but smiled to show that I really agreed with what he wasn't saying; our two companions in the backseat deserved each other. Doc's grin only got wider, the wiry white fuzz on his upper lip looking even sparser when he did. None of the rest of us wore any facial hair and I knew from past experience—this wasn't Doc's first trip with me on one of these jaunts—he would be shaving off that mustache as soon as we reached the cabin.

He’d need to do something about the billy-goat eyebrows, though.

Dr. Beaumont Abrough must have been in his early seventies and the years had bent him so he stood several inches under six feet, the shortest of our foursome. He wore an orange hunter's cap, just like the rest of us; in his case covering a nearly bald pate with scattered wiry white hairs much like his mustache and eyebrows. Blue eyes the same color as Cameo Lake twinkled in the midst of laugh lines behind steely-rimmed bifocals.

Within ten minutes of meeting him, six years ago, we had been "Doc" and "Pete" as if he'd known me all my life. Doc had been born in New Orleans but spoke with no regional accent of any sort. His wide, pleasant face looked a bit jowly and he carried a paunch but he was in pretty good shape for his age. I'd made sure he had kept up a daily exercise routine before I took him on any hunting trip; he ran for twenty minutes every other day and walked for an hour on the days he didn't run.

He still kept his Wichita, Kansas practice open, seeing a few patients four days a week; specializing in prenatal care for women with difficult pregnancies.

He made a real contrast to George Hatton sitting behind me and who I privately called "The General". Actually, he'd never been in the military, a trick knee he'd picked up in a high school football game thirty years ago made him unacceptable to recruiters. But his attitudes and demeanor spoke volumes about his ambition to command and he wore his kinky black hair in a military cut. Shoe-brown eyes failed to warm his typical pit bull expression and a scattering of cheerful, if darker, freckles looked out of place in his coffee-and-heavy-cream-colored face.

He ran a regional milling and machining company from East St. Louis with consistent if unspectacular efficiency, having risen from the position of despised son-in-law to respected president of operations. He spoke forcefully with clear diction and flat Midwestern vowels, not a trace of the Cleveland black neighborhood where he'd been born.

Missouri State Senator Josia Dunn, Hatton's argufying backseat opponent, used a cornpone, good ol' boy way of speaking that he had a right to, having been born in Buffalo, Missouri on the edge of the Ozarks. Physically the leanest of us, he was also the tallest with a great big head and a mane of ginger-colored hair. His numerous freckles were a bright tan on a pinkish complexion and seemed a perfect match for his pale blue eyes.

Dunn's politics were of the practical sort, neither a liberal nor a conservative but a workingman who served on numerous committees in the state legislature while also heading up, at least as figurehead, a dozen or more charities and service organizations. Everybody who had never had to listen to him non-stop for three hours liked the man and even though he annoyed me, I could see how he kept getting re-elected.

I'd asked him about the spelling of his first name and he had said, "My daddy knocked the 'h' outen me fore I was waist high." I suspected him of padding his down home vocabulary by watching Beverly Hillbillies reruns but it was hard not to laugh when he wanted you to.

I'm René Monforth Petersen and anyone can see why I prefer to be called "Pete" except on special occasions.

I've been leading wilderness trips into Montana and Alberta for about eight years, before that I studied linguistics in several different universities on three continents but failed to earn a degree due to continuing disagreements over tuition and such. I'm a typical American of thoroughly mixed descent; my mother is Canadian-born with one parent half-English and half Gypsy Romany and the other French-speaking part-Algonquin Quebecois; my father's grandfathers both came from Sweden but one married a German-American lady and the other an Ulster lass straight off the boat.

I speak only English fluently but I can get by in three other languages and order a beer and find my way to the bathroom in four or five more. I'm medium-tall with brown hair and hazel eyes and I'm not usually considered ugly. Properly turned out, I've even been described as cute.

If we seem an oddly assorted group, well, we did have one thing in common and it wasn't a desire to shoot elk. An isolated cabin in the Montana wilderness suited our purposes and I guided such trips for the successful and well-known ten or twelve times a year; people who needed to get out of the public eye for a time to indulge in their hobby.

Despite the testosterone funk in the vehicle, we were all secret crossdressers, though not secret from each other. We met up online, except for Doc and I who had become acquainted earlier through a mutual friend. The protocol and negotiations involved in an expedition like this took a lot of time and energy and resembled nothing so much as arranging a clandestine meeting of double agents or a marriage between Medieval royalty.

It both amused and annoyed me to think about it but I kept my mind on the track and steering the big Lincoln around obstacles when I heard Hatton mutter, "What the hell am I seeing?"

"Where?" I asked. "What are you talking about?"

"Off to the left, above the clouds," he said.

I glanced. "That's Mount Drake, highest peak around here. Mt. Pell is behind us and Mt. Jackson off to the right.” I didn't see exactly what he was talking about because of the window column.

"Not the mountain, above the mountain," said the General.

Doc leaned forward to peer up through the windshield. "I...what is that?"

I still couldn't see it, probably because of needing to watch the track I was following.

"What are y'all talking about?" Dunn asked.

"Is it the peak of the mountain sticking above the clouds?" I suggested.

Hatton snorted. "Damn tall mountain if it is, practically right over us."

"It looks like a hole in the sky," Doc said. "Over the clouds, to the left and above the sun."

"I gotta see this, it's making me crazy," said Dunn. "Stop the car and let's all get a good look."

"The sun will be behind the clouds in a few minutes, then behind the mountain. It'll start getting dark pretty quick," I pointed out.

"Stop the car," the General ordered.

I stopped in the first clearing I came to and we all piled out to look up, moving to the front of the vehicle and squinting against the glare.

The trees all around us weren't blocking our view; it really was quite high in the sky. Doc had pegged it, a roughly diamond-shaped black patch about the size of a dime held at arm's length--a hole in the sky. The edges seemed to have a rainbow effect from blue sky, through green and gold to purple and then black; it looked deep. I've seen sundogs and the Northern Lights, I even saw the Green Flash once from a trans-Pacific airliner, but I'd never seen anything like this.

"Aurora Borealis?" guessed Dunn.

"No," I said. "It's daylight and the Northern Lights don't look like that."

"Does anything?" asked Doc.

"Nothing I've ever heard of," said Hatton.

We all got cricks in our neck staring at it and Dunn lost his balance, staggering into the side of the SUV. "Golly," he said. "Anyone got a phone we can use to call someone?"

"Cell phones don't work up here, it's one of the reasons we come," said Doc. He squatted beside the truck, took off his glasses and rubbed his neck and face to relieve tension.

"Satellite phone?" suggested Dunn then he added, "Hey, maybe it's a satellite?" His pale eyes squinted upward and his mouth twisted in something very like fear or awe.

Hatton snorted his derision. "Hell of a big one but it doesn't look like any kind of satellite to me."

"We've got a radio in the truck and another base radio at the cabin," I said. Something in my mind had twigged to some reference that almost matched the appearance of our mysterious hole in the sky. I'd read many times about the beliefs of my Swedish ancestors. "Bifrost," I said.

"Beef roast? You getting hungry?" asked Dunn.

But Doc had caught the referent. He nodded. "The Rainbow Bridge. Asgard, Thor, Loki and all that."

"No shit?" said Dunn, startling all of us into looking at him; he almost never cursed or used bad language, nothing stronger than darn or gosh. "It's getting bigger," he added and we looked back at the hole, now the apparent size of a quarter or the full moon.

"Has it been growing all the time we've been watching?" I asked after a bit more staring.

"No," said Dunn. "It just suddenly doubled up, like, like..." Simile failed him for a moment. "Like a barrel o'moonshine rollin' downstairs and hittin' each step," he finished, a strained comparison and he looked a bit apologetic about making it.

Just then the apparition lurched again, more than doubling in size and triggering a wild scramble as we each tried to figure out something sensible to do — or anything at all, sensible or not.

"Get that goddamn radio out, Petersen," ordered the General but I'd already sprinted to the back of the SUV and opened the door to get at the communications gear we had stowed there.

"Find me some clean shorts while you're in there, Pete," said Doc in a completely normal tone of voice.

We all snickered and Dunn commented, "A goldurn near thing for me."

"Near thing, hell," said Doc. "I've got a 74-year-old bladder and that scared the piss out of me."

I handed the aerial base to Dunn, "Put this on top of the truck," I told him. He did so, placing it behind the bunjeed-down suitcases, and I flicked the switch to bring the radio to life.

The sudden burst of static almost drowned out Hatton shouting, "It just got bigger again! It's a goddamn Cosmic Cunt come to suck us all up to infinity!"

In a way, he turned out to be right.