He stood patiently, himself camouflaged, and watched for the outside appearance of someone belonging to the house, seeing only the shadows of movement behind windows that he guessed to be at the kitchen. The light, fading in the sun’s fall behind the mountains, was tricky. He could not tell if the movement was from man or woman. Woman, he believed, from the size and shape of the shadows. Near the front of the house, there was a car, a Ford of recent model, he thought.

He looked for dogs, but did not see any, and thought it strange. Most homes had dogs for hunting or for keeping guard with their barking.

In the pasture leading to the barn, he saw two tan cows and a white mule standing near the fence, each claiming a familiar space, each casting a gaze toward the house. The mule was old, as was one cow. The other cow was younger, had birthed one calf, he judged, but the calf was not in sight. There was still a sleek coloring to its coat and an alert lift to its head, as though it understood the time for being milked was soon. The older cow seemed sleepy, the mule weary from years of harnessed labor, having a used-up look about its drooping head, its bowed back, its ribbed sides. He saw the bobbing heads of chickens prancing in the yard near the barn, making the pecking that filled their gizzards with grains of sand.

The cows and the mule and the chickens could have been from the farm of his childhood. The cows, the mule, the chickens, the house, the barn—all that he saw was as familiar to him as the reflection of his own image in a mirror. It was the look of the South in the years after the war. The only changes seemed to be the number of tractors in fields and the lights from electricity that bloomed like the buds of flowers through the windows of the houses.

He saw the door to the house open, and a woman carrying a milk pail stepped outside. She crossed the yard to the barn, her stride showing purpose. He moved to step from the woods—to call out—then moved back. Was pushed back. Not by his own action, but by a force he could not explain, yet was familiar to him. It had been with him through the war, invisible, though present. Something he had learned to trust. Once, he had talked of it to an army chaplain and also to his sergeant. The chaplain had reasoned it to be an angel, saying he had seen such angels drifting like holy medics among the dying, their wispy bodies floating over battlefields in the stagnant air of gunsmoke, the gunsmoke taking shapes that carried wings. His sergeant had called it gut instinct, the thing that bullets could not strike and bayonets could not penetrate. He believed both were right. Sometimes, he was certain he could see the angels.