Snow was falling when they came out of practice at the Levis ice rink. Travis looked across the river, but he could no longer make out the towering Château. He turned his face upward, and the sky seemed neither to begin nor end, just to fade away into grey as millions of fat, fluffy snowflakes came drifting straight down upon him. Nish was also looking up, his mouth open as the large flakes landed, and melted instantly, on his cheeks and nose and outstretched tongue.
“They’re big enough to eat!” he shouted.
Soon all the Owls were dancing around in the muffed silence of a heavy snowfall, their open mouths turned towards the sky. The snow gathering on the players’ shoulders and tuques was fast changing the entire team from a variety of bright colours to the soft white of fresh snow. The Owls were vanishing before each other’s eyes.
Mr. Dillinger was sitting in the driver’s seat as the Owls boarded, but for once there were no high-fives or friendly shoulder punches. Mr. Dillinger had a newspaper spread over the steering wheel, and he was staring at it as if it were some broken piece of equipment he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to fix.
When Mr. Dillinger saw Muck approaching the bus, he folded up the paper and jumped down the steps, intercepting the coach before he could board. The two men hurried back towards the rink doors, where they huddled together under an overhang in the roof as Mr. Dillinger showed Muck something on the front page. Mr. Dillinger made his way back onto the bus, scanning the seats for someone in particular.
He caught Travis’s eyes.
“Travis,” Mr. Dillinger said in a very serious voice. “Could you come out here a moment?”
Travis got up, painfully aware that the other Owls were staring at him. There must be a problem, but what was so important that Travis had to be dragged off the bus for a conference with Muck and Mr. Dillinger?
Muck had finished reading whatever it was that Mr. Dillinger had showed him. His eyes looked partly sad, partly angry.
“You’d better have a look at this,” Muck said, tapping a front-page headline.
Travis read the headline quickly, his heart beginning to pound: “PIG LATIN AS GOOD AS FRENCH, YOUNG ANGLO HOCKEY PLAYER SAYS.”
Travis didn’t understand. He read the byline: “By Bart Lundrigan, Staff Writer.” He looked at the top of the page: The Montreal Inquirer.
“It’s apparently run all over the country,” Mr. Dillinger said. “I called home. It’s in the Toronto papers. Vancouver. Calgary. They all picked it up.”
Travis was still reading:
QUEBEC CITY–As far as some young anglophone hockey players at the Quebec International Peewee Tournament are concerned, the French language is no better than schoolyard “Pig Latin.”
This is only one of many revelations to come from a series of young players’ diary excerpts obtained by The Inquirer
The “Two Solitudes” that first did bloody battle here back in 1759 are still going at it, it appears, nearly two and a half centuries after French and English forces met on the Plains of Abraham.
Take, for example, a diary excerpt from Travis Lindsay, a tousle-haired, sweet-smiling 12-year-old, who brags, “I won’t speak French to anyone.”
Lindsay, who admits to having studied French in school, shows nothing but disdain for Canada’s other offcial language.
“They talk way too fast,” he complains in his diary. “It’s sure a lot easier when they speak English.”
Young Lindsay compares this Canadian “foreign language” to the game of “Pig Latin” played in schoolyards, where children make up a silly language by slightly changing each English word.
Apparently members of Lindsay’s team, the Screech Owls, have been making fun of French by choosing to speak Pig Latin instead.
Lindsay’s billets, André and Giselle Dupont–who are putting Lindsay and two teammates up for free–speak only French. But talking with them directly is not worth the effort, according to the young peewee player, because the Dupont children “speak perfect English and translate everything for us.”
Lindsay tells approvingly of how Nicole Dupont pours scorn on her unsuspecting father in English.
Another young peewee player, 13-year-old Brent Sutton, captain of the Camrose Wildcats, a team from Alberta, writes in his diary that he doesn’t like the food and that, “There should be a law that all the signs are in English as well.”…
Travis had read enough. He folded the paper and handed it back to Muck.
“Those your words?” Muck asked.
Travis didn’t know what to say, he was in a state of shock. The words were kind of what he had written down, but he had never meant them to say what the paper was saying.
“I–I didn’t say it that way.”
Muck stared at his young captain, measuring him up.
“You got that diary with you?” Muck asked.
“Right here,” said Travis, pulling it out of his pocket.
Muck read through Travis’s first entry. He seemed satisfied with what he read. He didn’t even bother to read the paragraph Travis had written last night before he went to bed.
“He’s twisted everything,” Muck said.
“That dirty son of a–!” said Mr. Dillinger through clenched teeth. “I’m sorry, Travis–I thought it would be pretty harmless. This is all my fault–”
Muck cut off Mr. Dillinger, who seemed near tears. “You want to keep on doing this?” he asked Travis.
“Not if it turns out like that,” Travis said.
“Fine,” Muck said. He stuffed the diary hard inside his jacket. “I’ll be the one keeping the diary now, okay?”