高级英语第一册(修订本)第12课Lesson12 The Loons原文和翻译概要1.docxVIP

PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT24 The Loons Margarel Laurence 1、Just below Manawaka, where the Wachakwa River ran brown and noisy over the pebbles , the scrub oak and grey-green willow and chokecherry bushes grew in a dense thicket . In a clearing at the centre of the thicket stood the Tonnerre familys shack. The basis at this dwelling was a small square cabin made of poplar poles and chinked with mud, which had been built by Jules Tonnerre some fifty years before, when he came back from Batoche with a bullet in his thigh, the year that Riel was hung and the voices of the Metis entered their long silence. Jules had only intended to stay the winter in the Wachakwa Valley, but the family was still there in the thirties, when I was a child. As the Tonnerres had increased, their settlement had been added to, until the clearing at the foot of the town hill was a chaos of lean-tos, wooden packing cases, warped lumber, discarded car types, ramshackle chicken coops , tangled strands of barbed wire and rusty tin cans. 2、The Tonnerres were French half breeds, and among themselves they spoke a patois that was neither Cree nor French. Their English was broken and full of obscenities. They did not belong among the Cree of the Galloping Mountain reservation, further north, and they did not belong among the Scots-Irish and Ukrainians of Manawaka, either. They were, as my Grandmother MacLeod would have put it, neither flesh, fowl, nor good salt herring . When their men were not working at odd jobs or as section hands on the C.P. R. they lived on relief. In the summers, one of the Tonnerre youngsters, with a face that seemed totally unfamiliar with laughter, would knock at the doors of the towns brick houses and offer for sale a lard -pail full of bruised wild strawberries, and if he got as much as a quarter he would grab the coin and run before the customer had time to change her mind. Sometimes old Jules, or his son Lazarus, would get mixed up in a Saturday-night brawl , and would hit ou