The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 2

by Roy MacGregor

  Our billets, Mr. and Mrs. Dupont, don’t speak English, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Their children, Jean-Paul and Nicole, speak perfect English and translate everything for us.

  Nicole played a little trick on her dad when she made a good joke in English about his rink and he didn’t understand her. She then told him something completely different in French so his feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

  Lars Johanssen is on my team and he’s billeted with Wayne Nishikawa and me at the Duponts. Lars is from Sweden but speaks pretty good French, which sure surprised Nish and me. (We call Wayne “Nish.”)

  Nish is more like me. He doesn’t speak French at all. He made a great joke on Lars by telling him to “Get a life!” in Pig Latin, which Lars had never heard of. I think he thinks Nish is pretty smart and speaks a real foreign language like Pig Latin!

  I did really poorly in French this year and don’t think I’ll be taking it again. I won’t speak French to anyone–I guess because I’m too embarrassed–and I find it hard to understand when they speak to me. They talk way too fast. It sure is a lot easier when they speak English, like J-P and Nicole do for us.

  I’m really excited about the first game against Halifax. We’re supposed to be the favourites (or so they say), but Muck, our coach, says that Halifax is the “sleeper” team in the tournament. That means that they’re going to do much better than anyone expects. Anyone but Muck, that is, I guess.

  Your friend,

  Travis Lindsay

  The Halifax Hurricanes were indeed much better than most people expected. One shift into the game, and it was Halifax 1, Screech Owls 0. The “sleepers” had jumped on a poor pass between Data and Nish when a diving Hurricane punched the puck ahead with his stick and the big Halifax centre picked it up and beat Jeremy in goal with a delayed backhand.

  “Wake up out there!” Muck said when they skated back to the bench.

  Muck was talking about more than the bad pass. The Owls had skated out on the ice to be greeted by more than six thousand fans. The noise had been incredible. Youngsters were hanging over the boards and waiting in the corridors for autographs. Nish–now known widely as “Paul Kariya’s cousin”–was by far the most popular player, and Muck had to stop him from signing everyone’s card during the warm-up.

  The Halifax team had one superb line, and Sarah’s line, with Travis on left and Dmitri on right, was assigned to check them. Muck kept changing Sarah, Dmitri, and Travis on the fly to keep his matchups the way he wanted, and it meant that Sarah’s line couldn’t concentrate on offence as much as they might have liked. Fortunately, little Simon Milliken got the Owls back in the game with a nifty backhander.

  Sarah played brilliantly. She stayed with the big centre without letting up, and every time he got a pass she was there to intercept it or lift his stick just enough for him to miss the puck.

  “You’re getting under his skin,” Muck whispered to Sarah as she came off for a rest. “Next shift, I want to see him go off.”

  Travis could see Sarah smile as Muck said this. He knew she got as big a kick out of checking players as she did out of scoring goals. Most players with Sarah’s ability to skate and shoot thought of nothing else but scoring and being a hero, but Sarah was different.

  The Halifax coach tried to sneak his big centre back out by changing the line immediately after the face-off. Muck slapped Sarah’s shoulder pads and called for Jesse, who was closest to the bench, to get off the ice while Sarah leapt the boards and gave chase.

  The Halifax centre picked up the puck at his own blueline. He hit his right winger and then burst up through centre, rapping his stick on the ice for the return feed, which came almost instantly. Sarah, however, was already there, deftly lifting the centre’s stick as he looked for the pass, and using her skate to tip the sliding puck back behind him so she would have it free.

  She was already past him, the puck hers. She took one quick stride and went hurtling, face first, towards the Halifax blueline, the referee’s whistle screaming as she fell.

  The big centre didn’t even pretend to be innocent. He slammed his stick on the ice and skated angrily to the penalty box.

  “Stay out there,” Muck said when Sarah, still smiling, tried to come off. “Travis, Dmitri, Nish, Data.”

  The first power-play line hurried out, and though Sarah was still gasping for air, she took, and won, the face-off. She fired the puck back to Nish, who skated behind the Owls’ net and waited. Travis skated past and pretended to pick up the puck, taking one of the forecheckers with him and leaving the puck for Dmitri, who was coming in from the other side.

  Dmitri hit Sarah at the blueline, and Sarah tapped a little return pass between the defenceman’s feet, leaving the puck alone for a moment until Dmitri, with his exceptional speed, caught up to it and started in, two-on-one, with Travis.

  Dmitri would usually shoot in this situation–“You can never go wrong with a shot,” Muck always said–but this time he came in and turned in a spinnerama, dishing off the puck to Travis as the defenceman played the body.

  Travis was home free. A quick deke, a pause, and he snapped the puck high, his heart singing as it rang in off the crossbar.

  Owls 2, Hurricanes 1.

  After the Owls took the lead, the game was all Sarah’s. She so frustrated the Halifax team, particularly their top player, they took penalty after penalty. The game ended 5–1 on a second goal by Travis, who merely tapped in a puck that Sarah left for him at the side of the crease as she drew the poor Halifax goaltender completely out of the net.

  “Room service,” she joked as they skated off.

  “Thanks,” said Travis.

  “That one was too easy,” Muck told them as they sagged in the dressing room. “Next one’s going to be twice as hard for you, so don’t get any fancy notions into your head.”

  He stood at the centre of the room, scowling at them, his eyes slowly moving over each and every player. Nish, as usual, had his head down, almost between his legs.

  “Good game,” Muck added, then walked out.

  Outside, J-P and Nicole were waiting. Nicole hugged Travis, who’d been named Best Player of the Game for the Owls, even though he knew, and everyone else seemed to know, that Sarah Cuthbertson had been the best player by far.

  “Bon match, Travis!” Nicole shouted. “Très bon!”

  “Merci” was all Travis could say. All he could ever say.

  “I scored, too,” said Nish. He was practically between them.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “Nice goal, too.”

  Nish smiled, happy to be noticed.

  “Who’s number 9?” J-P asked.

  “Sarah Cuthbertson,” Travis answered. “She’s good, eh?”

  “She’s fantastique!” J-P said. “Incroyable!”

  “Hey! Travis!” a voice called from down the corridor.

  Travis turned. The reporter, Bart Lundrigan was coming at him, his face one huge smile.

  “Great, great game, Trav!” the reporter said.

  “Thanks,” said Travis.

  “You bring the diary?” the reporter asked.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Great! Super! Can I get it off you now?”

  “Yeah…sure,” Travis said. “It’s in my bag.”

  “Great,” the reporter said. “Super!”

  The Screech Owls had a practice scheduled for noon the following day at a small rink in Levis, the town directly across the St. Lawrence River from Quebec. Before they headed over on the old school bus, however, Mr. Dillinger and Muck took the Owls on a walking tour of the Old City.

  They parked near the Quebec legislature, an imposing grey building that was almost dwarfed by, of all things, the largest snow fort any Owl had ever seen. The “fort” was actually the Ice Palace, where Bonhomme, the mascot of the Winter Carnival, lives during the festivities. Some of the Owls–including Nish, of course–got their pictures taken with the jolly mascot, who was kind of a cross between a snowman and a fur-tradin
g voyageur, with his white costume topped by a long red tuque and with a red-and-blue sash around his middle. Then they set off in a large group. They walked through a stone gateway and down Rue Petit Champlain, which Muck claimed was the oldest street in all of North America. They toured a church that was more than 350 years old and then twisted down so many narrow streets that eventually the Owls gave up trying to keep track of where they were.

  Muck, oddly enough, always seemed to know. He would stand a moment, consider his options, then point in a certain direction, and always they would come out onto a main street where the calèches were clomping and jangling by, steam rising from the backs of the horses. There were crowds watching jugglers and clowns and men on enormous stilts. And everywhere there were young hockey players with team jackets or caps or tuques on–players from Canada and the United States and Sweden and Finland.

  Muck led them behind the towering Château Frontenac and onto Dufferin Terrace, a massive boardwalk that had been shovelled off and sanded for walking. The boardwalk overlooked the St. Lawrence River, which was choked in a treacherous jumble of broken ice floes.

  Muck pointed out a place in the distance where the Iroquois people had set up fishing camps hundreds, thousands, of years ago, long before anyone else came along to “discover” this land and claim it for any king or queen that lived in France or England.

  “Right on!” shouted Jesse Highboy.

  Muck told them where Samuel de Champlain had set up his first fur-trading post in 1603, and how the French explorers had all but starved to death the first couple of winters here. If it hadn’t been for the natives, Muck said, they would never have made it.

  With his big arms sweeping up and down the river, Muck showed them how the English ships had come down under cover of dark back in 1759. He walked them to the steep cliffs where the English had somehow climbed up from the river for a twenty-minute battle with the French that had decided Canada’s future for the next 250 years, and was, according to Muck, still being fought by the politicians.

  He told them that the old part of the city down below the Château had been virtually turned to dust by the English bombardment.

  “Forty thousand cannon balls,” said Muck. “Forty thousand cannon balls and ten thousand fire bombs–you think you could stop all that, Jeremy?” he said, turning to the young goalie.

  Jeremy giggled. “No.”

  Muck took them out onto the Plains of Abraham, where Quebecers in rainbow-coloured outfits were cross-country skiing, and he showed them where the British invader, General James Wolfe, was shot and lay down to die in the grass as the battle raged around him, and then where the French general, Marquis de Montcalm, was hit by a musket bullet and lay mortally wounded.

  “Did he die?” Fahd asked, breathlessly.

  “That’s what ‘mortally wounded’ means, son–but he didn’t die here.”

  The Owls looked around, expecting a marker. “Where, then?” Andy asked.

  Muck considered a moment. “The French carried their leader back into the Old City,” the coach told them, “but the battle for Quebec was already lost. They took him to the Ursuline chapel, thinking he’d be safe in the care of the nuns, but he died there a couple of days later, and they buried him in the crypt. The British had already taken possession of the city.”

  “There’s a crypt around here?” Data, the horror-movie buff, asked.

  Muck smiled. “There are lots of crypts around here. That’s where they used to bury people.”

  Data went silent, obviously disappointed.

  “They kept his skull, though,” Muck added, almost as an afterthought.

  “What?” several Owls shouted at once.

  Muck seemed shocked at such interest. “His skull,” he repeated. “They dug Montcalm up about a hundred years later, and the Ursuline Sisters took his skull away. It’s on display up in the Old City.”

  “You’ve seen it?” Data practically screamed.

  “Sure,” Muck said.

  “Can we?” Andy pressed.

  “You want to see an old skull?” Muck asked, pretending to be surprised.

  “Sure!” the Owls shouted at once.

  “Well, good,” Muck said. “I didn’t know this team had so many history buffs.”

  Travis giggled silently to himself. “History” had nothing to do with it. They just wanted to see a human skull, and if it had a hole in it where a bullet had gone through, so much the better!

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” Muck said to Data.

  “Anything!” Data screeched.

  “You get a point the next match, we’ll all go pay the Marquis a visit.”

  “Alll righhhttt!” the Owls shouted.

  They headed back along a short cut that returned them to the Ice Palace and the parking area where Mr. Dillinger had left the bus.

  Travis found himself dropping back.

  “Muck?” Travis asked tentatively.

  The big coach turned his eyes on his young captain.

  “Yes?”

  “Where’d you pick up all the history? That was neat.”

  Muck smiled. “There’s more to life than hockey, Mr. Lindsay. Surely you know that by now.”

  “Yeah, but…well, how come you know all that stuff?”

  “That ‘stuff’ is who we are. I’m a Canadian. I want to know what makes us the way we are.”

  “Oh,” said Travis. “I see.”

  But he really didn’t see at all.

  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.”…