Meanwhile he needed to be out of sight before daylight; he and his chute. Someone would arrive grout sunup, perhaps earlier, to drive the cows to the barn for milking. And while his invisibility cloak might hide him from a farmer, whoever came for the cows might have a dog to help them, and he wasn’t at all sure the cloak would hide him from a dog.
In less than an hour, dawn paled the sky, its thin gray light exposing details. Cloaking himself, Macurdy started toward the lakeside woods, going out of his way to approach the cows. They looked up as he came, poised to run, so he veered off. They saw through his spell; dogs would too.
The lakeside woods, he discovered, consisted entirely of old trees, mostly beeches fire-scarred and hollow, stan above thin grass speckled with violets. Browsing had eliminate brush and young trees, except for ground juniper, which grew in scattered patches, prostrate and dense. He selected a patch, and lying on his belly, shoved the white chute as far as he could beneath the sprawling evergreen shrubs, shoving his helmet after it. Then, shouldering his packframe, he sat waiting on a rock, still cloaked, thinking he’d have to do something about the stink on his jumpsuit. Close up or in a closed space, he might be unseen, but hardly unnoticed.
He didn’t wait long. His watch read local 0512, and the sun was up, when he saw the herd girl walking up the road. Reaching the pasture gate, she swung it open and yodelled.
The cows started briskly toward her, ready for the relief of being milked, and the grain that went with it.
When they were gone, he spent half an hour quartering the pasture in the sunlit morning, protected by his cloak, looking for anything orange. In the downwind direction, he went all the way to the pasture fence; to hunt upwind made no sense. While searching, three ways occurred to him of bypassing his need for the missing fuse and caps; two were iffy, the other suicidal. Iffy meant possible failure, but he wasn’t at all sure he was ready for deliberate suicide, even if it saved far more lives than the one he’d lose.
Then another thought occurred to him: Suppose the drift chute had come down on a cow, and caught on a horn? Although the odds of it happening were minute, it was possible. On the other hand, any cow he’d ever known, and he’d known many, would have bolted, run to the woods if a chute had settled on its head. And he’d surely have noticed when it came out to answer the herd girl’s call.
Nonetheless, for a while he wandered about the woods, looking, because if it had happened that way, the cow would have tried to rid herself of the chute, and perhaps rubbed it off against a tree. After a bit, though, he gave it up and went down to the shore, where he ate a K ration, topped off his canteen, then removed his jumpsuit and used moss and icy lake water to scrub off the cow manure. Most of it had been on his chute pack, but there was some on a shoulder and one pants leg. When he’d finished, they remained stained, but the manure was gone, and after it dried, it wouldn’t smell nearly as strong.
As far as he could see, there was nothing useful left to do there, so he started for the schloss, hiking along the lakeshore to avoid sharp eyes that might otherwise penetrate his cloak in the bright sunlight.
Avoiding the road, Macurdy approached the schloss through the forest. On this lovely, if chill and breezy spring morning, the SS platoon was doing morning exercises on the large front lawn, shouting cadence, young voices strong and vigorous. So he crossed the lawn behind the building, to the end of the near wing and the cellar’s rear entryway. Presumably the whole platoon was in front. No one would be in a position to see him unless they were on duty in the stable, perhaps feeding the colonel’s horses.
Moving quietly down the entryway steps, he tried the door to the cellar. It was Thursday, and he didn’t really expect to find it unbarred, except perhaps on Friday and Saturday evenings when guardsmen would bring party girls from town. But to his surprise, it gave. Opening it a few inches, he listened hard, and hearing nothing, peered in. The long corridor was empty, so he entered, closing the door behind him, beginning toy eel optimistic again. Someone, he noticed, had put fresh bulbs in two fixtures that had been lightless before. It was still poorly lit, but lighter than it had been.