这是一个小孩杀人的故事，有耐心的八婆们慢慢看吧。整个故事从头到尾都阴森森冷飕飕的，虽然杀人在最后一部分才有写，可是自始至终都很阴郁。

BLACK ICE
by CATE KENNEDY
　　
　　When I went up to check my traps, I saw that the porch lights at the lady’s place were still on, even though it was morning. “That’s an atrocious waste of power,” my dad said when I told him. His breath huffed in the air like he was smoking a cigar. The rabbit carcasses steamed when we ripped the skin off, and it came away like a glove.
　　
　　Skin the rabbit—that’s what my mum used to say when she pulled off my shirt and singlet for a bath. Mr. Bailey gives me three dollars for every rabbit, to feed his dogs. I take them down to him in the wooden box with a picture of an apple on it. At the butcher’s, rabbits are only two-fifty but Mr. Bailey says he likes mine better. I’ve got fifty-eight dollars saved. I want to get a bike.
　　
　　Dad thinks it’s good to save up your money. The tourists who stand around the real-estate agent’s window pointing and touching each other on the arm—he reckons they’re loonies. When the lady up the road bought that house, my dad went over after the “Sold” sign got stuck on and everybody had gone. He took one of the clapboards off the side of the house and looked under at the rotting pilings, and made a noise like he was holding back a sneeze. “That lady’s a bloody wacker,” he said. “Those pilings are bloody atrocious.”
　　
　　He stood there looking at the house and rolled a cigarette. “Throwing good money after bad,” he said, and kicked the clapboard. I kicked it, too.
　　
　　After she moved in I didn’t set no more snares up there on the hill. I walked in the state forest on the tracks round the lake, the tracks the rabbits make. I made myself small as a rabbit and moved through them on my soft scrabbly claws. I saw everything differently then. Saw the places where they sat and rested, the spots where they reached up with their noses and ate tiny strips of bark from the bottoms of the river willows.
　　
　　You’ve got to set a trap so that it kills the rabbit straight off. On the leg is no good. All night the rabbit will cry and twist, then you’ll have to kill it in the morning with its eyes looking at you, wondering why you did it. Mr. Bailey, he said he can’t believe that I can catch them so near town. I told him that you just have to watch things and work out where to put the trap, that’s all. He nodded so small you could only just see his chin moving up and down. “You’ve got it there, Billy,” he said.
　　
　　After he paid me we looked at the dogs and had a cup of tea. His dogs know me and why I come. Their eyes get different when they see me.
　　
　　Lately, in the morning, everything is frozen. All up the hill are the gum trees and every time I look at them I think of that day in school when I was right and Mr. Fry was wrong. Mr. Fry showed us a picture and told us that trees lose their leaves in autumn, and the other kids started writing it down, but I felt the words come up, and I said no they don’t lose their leaves, they lose their bark. Mr. Fry said how typical it was that the one time I opened my mouth in class I’d come up with the wrong answer. Now I look at the trees standing bare in the mist and think about how I kept shaking my head when he told me to say I was wrong, and how the other kids sat smiling, staring down at their hands, waiting for after school like the dogs wait for the rabbits.
　　
　　
　　
　　When you smell the leaves, they’re like cough lollies, and the bark goes all colors when it’s wet. One day I was looking at the leaves and my eyes went funny and I flew up high and looked down at the tops of the trees all bunched together and they were like the bumpy green material on the armchairs at my Aunty Lorna’s place. I never told no one about that, not even my dad. The trees talk loud when it’s windy and soft when it’s quiet. I don’t know what they talk about—rain, probably. When they get new gum tips, they’re so full of sap they shiver in the air. Maybe they’re excited. Or frightened.
　　
　　But now that it’s winter the trees just look dark and shrunken, as if they’re hanging on by shutting off their minds, like my grandpop when he had the stroke and Dad said that his body was closing down slowly. On the track there’s ice crystals in the clay, and when you look real close you can see that the crystals are long, growing into lines, and the more mushy the clay the tighter the crystals pack in. They do it in the night, in a cold snap. You can put your foot at the edge of a puddle and just press real gently, and all these little cracks run through it, rushing outward like tiny creeks.
　　
　　Sometimes there’s frost on the rabbits’ fur. I brush it off with my hand. Rabbit fur smells nice, like lichen or dry moss. My mum left behind some leather gloves with rabbit fur inside and when I put them on once I pulled my hot hands out and smelled her smell. “What are you bawling for?” my dad said. I hid the gloves under my mattress. When I touch them they feel like green leaves, soft and dry and bendy, not knowing autumn’s coming.
　　
　　
　　
　　The morning I saw the lady’s porch lights my dad gave me a new hat for my chilblains. He made it for me from rabbit skins. He rubbed my ears hard with his sweater till my mouth ached from holding it shut, then he pulled the rabbit-fur flaps down and tied them. “See you back here with the bunnies,” he said, squeezing his hands under his arms before he stoked up the chip furnace.
　　
　　One day a boy at my school who works at the feed supply told the other kids that we were so backward we didn’t even have hot and cold running water at our place. He said, “It’s like deliverance down there with you-know-who.” I asked Dad what deliverance meant and he rolled a cigarette and said why. The next time he wanted chicken pellets he asked for them to be delivered that day and then he stoked the chip furnace up so high that a spray of boiling water gushed up and hit the roof like rain and it sounded like the fancy coffee machine at the milk bar. When this boy came around with the pellets, Dad told him to empty them into the bin and then asked would he like to wash the dust off his hands in the kitchen. The boy went in. I stood looking at the hens and made myself small like them and felt the straw under my claws as I scratched around, and felt how the wheat powdered as I cracked it in my beak, and then there was a scream and the boy came running out holding his hands in front of him. They were bright pink, like plastic. As the boy ran past, my dad called, “Don’t forget to tell your friends.”
　　
　　
　　
　　I pushed the rabbits into a hessian bag and heard music coming out of the house with the lights on. It was violin stuff. I saw the lady who bought the house come out onto her porch as I cut across the ridge. She was wearing new overalls and you could still see the fold marks in them. She had hair the color of a fox. When she saw me her face went all bright and excited even though she didn’t know me—like the lady doctor who did all those stupid tests on me at school, just saying stupid words and expecting me to make up more words and say them straightaway and not giving me any time to think it over.
　　
　　She said, “Well, hello there, has the cat got your tongue?” She had lipstick on. I thought maybe she was on her way to church.
　　
　　I said I didn’t have a cat and her eyebrows went up.
　　
　　“You’re up very early on this wintry morning. What’s that you’ve got in your bag?” she said, like we were going to play a joke on someone. I showed her the top rabbit’s head and her mouth went funny and she said, “Oh dear, oh the poor little things. What did you want to kill them for?”
　　
　　I said for Mr. Bailey. I said they died very quickly and always got the traps right around their necks. She hugged herself with her arms and shook her head and said, “Goodness me,” looking at my rabbit-skin hat. I turned my head slowly round so she could see it better.
　　
　　She asked me suddenly if I lived in the house down the hill and I said yes. Then she said what a marvellous location and what a shame that it would cost an arm and a leg to put the power through, otherwise she would have made an offer, but this little place she’d picked up was such fun and a gold mine. She said all her friends from the city thought she was quite mad but she’d be the one laughing when property values went up and she’d done all the extensions. I was waiting for her to finish talking so I could go. I could feel the rabbits stiffening up inside the bag—I could smell them.
　　
　　“What’s your name?” she asked me finally, and I said Billy.
　　
　　“And do you go to school, Billy?”
　　
　　I looked at her and said you have to. Her eyes went all crinkly and happy again.
　　
　　“And is it a special school, just for special children?”
　　
　　I couldn’t work her out. Maybe she didn’t understand about school. I said not really, then my mouth blurted out, “You got hair like a fox.”
　　
　　She laughed like someone in a movie. “Good heavens,” she said. “You are a character, aren’t you?”
　　
　　A man in a red dressing gown came out onto the veranda and the lady said, “Look, darling, some local color.”
　　
　　“Love the hat,” the man said to me. I waited for them to tell me their names, but the man just complained that it was bloody freezing, and thank Christ they’d got the central heating in. The lady said yes, the whole place was shaping up well, then she looked out down the track and said, “The only problem is there’s no bloody view of the lake.” Then she said, “Billy, show Roger your bunnies, darling,” and I pulled one out and Roger said, “Good God.”
　　
　　They both laughed and laughed, and Roger said, “Well, it looks like the light’s on but there’s no one home.” Which was wrong. They were both home and they’d turned the lights off by then.
　　
　　When I walked down the track past the sharp turn and through the cutting, my boots cracked on the black ice. You’ve got to be careful you don’t go for a sixer on that. People say it’s invisible but it’s not really—you just have to get down real close to see where the water froze then melted a bit, then froze again, all through the night, till it’s like a piece of glass from an old bottle.
　　
　　Dad had had his shower by the time I got home. The rabbits were harder to skin because so much time had passed. The skins ripped off with the sound of one of those Band-Aids they put on your knees in the school sickroom. “Get them off,” my dad said when I came home with the Band-Aids on the time someone tripped me at school and I banged my knees on the concrete. Dad was watching me, so I pulled both of them off fast and my knees bled again. “Call that first aid? That’s bloody atrocious,” my dad said. “Get some air onto them.” I looked at my knees. They felt like the hinges inside had got stiff and rusty, like the oil in them had leaked out.
　　
　　Every day for the next few weeks, people drove up the hill to fix things in the lady’s house. You could hear banging and machines, and then a pointy bit of new roof pushed up over the trees. The lady’s friends, the ones who thought she was quite mad, came up a lot at first but then it got colder and they stopped. The lake froze over at the edges. One day I crept up and saw the lady on a new veranda, which was covered in pink paint, standing with her arms folded, just staring out at the trees. She didn’t look so happy now, with everything half finished and mud instead of a garden. There were big piles of rocks around, like she was waiting for someone to move them, and I saw a duck standing still as anything under a tree. I went closer and she saw me.
　　
　　“Well, Billy!” she called, and I went over and saw that the duck was a pretend one.
　　
　　“Look at all these bloody trees,” she said, sighing. “I’m sick of the sight of them.”
　　
　　She had the overalls on again but they didn’t look so new anymore.
　　
　　“What are those trees, anyway, Billy?” she said, and I said that they were gum trees, and she laughed and said she might have guessed that would be my answer, even though I hadn’t finished talking and was only sorting out what I was going to say next.
　　
　　I said there was going to be another cold snap that night and more hard weather. And she asked how did I know and I started explaining but she wasn’t really listening—she was still looking down the state-forest gully toward the lake, turning her head like the ladies in the shop when they’re buying dresses and looking at themselves in the mirror, deciding.
　　
　　Three weeks later I was up in the trees, just listening to them and looking for good spots for snares, when I found the first sick one. When I touched its leaves I knew it was dying. It was a big old tree and it used to have a big voice but now it was just breathing out. And it was bleeding. All around the trunk somebody had cut a circle, and sap was dripping out, which is the tree’s blood, my dad says. The person had used a little saw, then a hatchet, and I could see that whoever it was didn’t know how to use the saw properly and had scratched all up and down around the cut. There was nothing I could do for that tree. I wanted to kill it properly so that it wouldn’t just stand there looking at me, trying its hardest to stay alive.
　　
　　The next week I found another tree that was the same and then it just kept on happening: seven of the biggest trees got cut. When I looked real hard I flew up in the air again and saw them from the top and the dying ones made a kind of line down to the lake all the way from the lady’s house on the hill to the shore. Then I came back down onto the ground, and I saw how it was.
　　
　　“You’ve done it again, Billy,” Mr. Bailey said when I came by. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. Two big fat ones today.”
　　
　　I got my money and walked up the hill toward the lady’s house and I saw her through the trees, planting something in the garden. Dad said she kept the whole nursery in business.
　　
　　This time I got quite close to her and the pretend duck before she saw me, and she jumped backward.
　　
　　“Jesus, kid, just give it a break, will you?” she said, all shaky. She had a scarf that had slipped a bit off her hair and you could see where the red color stopped and the hair underneath was dark brown and silver, which was funny because sometimes it’s exactly the same on a fox’s tail, striped like that.
　　
　　“God, this place,” she said like a hiss, and threw down her trowel. “Isn’t the collective cold shoulder enough without you creeping around like . . .” Then she stopped and said, “Forget it, forget it.” I saw that she had a special little cushion for kneeling on and I was looking at that cushion when she said in a different voice, “Where did you get that box, Billy?”
　　
　　I said, “Out of the shed.” She laughed. I looked down at the box with the picture of the apple on it.
　　
　　“Out of your shed? That’s a finger-joint Colonial box, Billy. Do you know how much some of them are worth?”
　　
　　Her voice was all excited.
　　
　　“What about selling it to me?” she said.
　　
　　I said that it was my rabbit box and she asked did I have any others in the shed. I said I would have a look. She was a loony. My dad sometimes split up the old boxes for the chip furnace. He kept nails and bolts in them.
　　
　　“I know where there’ll be a lot,” I said. “At the Franklin garage sale.”
　　
　　Her eyes looked a little bit like Mr. Bailey’s dogs’ eyes inside the netting.
　　
　　“When is it?” she asked.
　　
　　“On Sunday. They got lots of stuff.”
　　
　　“Like what?” she asked, and then said a whole list of things—fire pokers? ironwork? cupboards?—and I just kept nodding.
　　
　　“Lots of that kind of thing,” I said. “Lots of these little boxes with writing and maps of Australia and animals like emus.”
　　
　　She folded her arms and looked at me harder. “Boxes with emus and kangaroos on them? With joints like this one?”
　　
　　“Yep,” I said. “But you got to get there real early in the morning. Like six-thirty or something. ’Cause other people come up from the city.”
　　
　　She asked me where Franklin’s was, and I told her.
　　
　　“I can get there earlier than the dealers,” she said, looking down the hill at the trees all secretly dying in a row to the lake.
　　
　　On Saturday I set a snare just inside a little tunnel of grass by the lake. Dad says that it’s bad to kill something without a good reason but I knew the rabbit wouldn’t mind. The trees were very quiet now. It was going to be a black frost. When the moon came up there was a yellow ring around it like around a Tilley lamp when you take it out on a frosty night.
　　
　　I couldn’t hardly get to sleep with thinking. I thought of her going out there with her new saw from the hardware shop in the night, cutting open the trees’ skin while the rabbits nosed around with their soft whiskery mouths and Mr. Bailey’s dogs cried and choked on their chains over and over.
　　
　　When I got up it was still dark, as dark as the steel on the monkey bars at school, cold metal that hurts your chest. I found a still, stiff rabbit in the trap and I felt sorry for it. I knew she would, too. Because in the lady’s head you can feel sorry and worried for rabbits but not for trees.
　　
　　The crystals had grown in the night and now the black ice was smooth as glass all around that sharp turn. I was careful with the rabbit, as careful as when I set a snare. It looked like it was alive all right, sitting up there by itself in the middle of the track.
　　
　　I got back into bed when I was finished. I felt my mum’s gloves.
　　
　　My dad knew I’d got up early when he came to wake me up again. I don’t know how.
　　
　　“You’d better go out and check your traps,” he said as he split the kindling.
　　
　　Up the road Farrelly’s tractor was pulling her car out of the ditch. It had crumpled into one of the big gums, and leaves and sticks had been shaken all over it. Mr. Farrelly said that the ambulance blokes themselves had nearly skidded on the bloody ice, trying to get in to help. “What’s a sheila like her doing getting up in the bloody dark on a Sunday morning, anyway?” Mr. Farrelly said as he put the hooks on. “Bloody loonies.”
　　
　　Under her front wheel I saw white fur, turned inside out like a glove, like my hat. I went down through the trees, touching the sick ones. On the way I stepped in a big patch of nettles. No use crying if you weren’t looking out for yourself, my dad says. I looked around and found some dock and rubbed it on and it stopped hurting like magic. For everything poisonous there’s something else nearby to cure it, if you just look around. My dad says that, too.
　　
　　I made a little fire and smoked my traps. Five more weeks and I can get a mountain bike.

偶打算精读这篇小说，欢迎有兴趣的八婆们积极参与。

最好边读边翻译--grin

BLACK ICE
黑冰
by CATE KENNEDY
　　
　　When I went up to check my traps, I saw that the porch lights at the lady’s place were still on, even though it was morning. “That’s an atrocious waste of power,” my dad said when I told him. His breath huffed in the air like he was smoking a cigar. The rabbit carcasses steamed when we ripped the skin off, and it came away like a glove.
    我起床检查陷阱的时候，看见那个女士家走廊的灯仍然亮着，虽然已经到早晨了。我把这告诉了爸，他说“太浪费电了。”他的气息喷到空气里，好象他在吸烟。我们开始剥兔子皮，兔子的尸体冒着水气，远远的看象一只手套。

关于That’s an atrocious waste of power这句中atrocious的翻译，谁有建议？

　Skin the rabbit—that’s what my mum used to say when she pulled off my shirt and singlet for a bath. Mr. Bailey gives me three dollars for every rabbit, to feed his dogs. I take them down to him in the wooden box with a picture of an apple on it. At the butcher’s, rabbits are only two-fifty but Mr. Bailey says he likes mine better. I’ve got fifty-eight dollars saved. I want to get a bike.

剥兔皮——妈脱掉我的衬衣和汗衫给我洗澡时经常这么说。每只兔子贝利先生给我三块钱，他用兔子来喂他家的那些狗。我把兔子装在木盒子里到他那里去，在木盒子上有一张画，上面画有一个苹果。屠夫那里的兔子只需要二块钱五十美分，但贝利先生说，他更喜欢我的。我已经存了五十八块钱了。我想买一辆自行车。

真浪费/极端浪费/肆无忌惮得浪费/……

　　Dad thinks it’s good to save up your money. The tourists who stand around the real-estate agent’s window pointing and touching each other on the arm-he reckons they’re loonies. When the lady up the road bought that house, my dad went over after the “Sold” sign got stuck on and everybody had gone. He took one of the clapboards off the side of the house and looked under at the rotting pilings, and made a noise like he was holding back a sneeze. “That lady’s a bloody wacker,” he said. “Those pilings are bloody atrocious.”
　　 爸认为存钱好。旅行者们围在不动产代理的窗口，指点着触摸着彼此的胳膊--他觉得他们是疯子。那个女士沿路上来买那套房子，在贴上“已售出”的牌子之后，我爸越过这个牌子，其他人都走了。他把房子侧面的一块隔板拿开，查看下面腐烂的木桩，发出了象刚忍住一个喷嚏时发出的声音来。“那位小姐很古怪，”他说，“这些该死的桩也很差劲。”

　　He stood there looking at the house and rolled a cigarette. “Throwing good money after bad,” he said, and kicked the clapboard. I kicked it, too.
他站在那里看着房子，卷了根烟。“把钱扔到水里了。”他说，踢了隔板一脚，我也踢了。

　　After she moved in I didn’t set no more snares up there on the hill. I walked in the state forest on the tracks round the lake, the tracks the rabbits make. I made myself small as a rabbit and moved through them on my soft scrabbly claws. I saw everything differently then. Saw the places where they sat and rested, the spots where they reached up with their noses and ate tiny strips of bark from the bottoms of the river willows.
在她搬进去之后，我没再山上那房子以上布置过陷阱。我在森林里顺着绕着湖的足迹走，这些足迹是野兔留下的。我让自己象只兔子那么小，用我柔软的小爪顺着那些足迹移动。我看见所有的事情都不同了。看到兔子们停留和休息的地方，看到它们用鼻子触碰过的痕迹，看到他们吃小条的来自河柳下端的树皮。


　　You’ve got to set a trap so that it kills the rabbit straight off. On the leg is no good. All night the rabbit will cry and twist, then you’ll have to kill it in the morning with its eyes looking at you, wondering why you did it. Mr. Bailey, he said he can’t believe that I can catch them so near town. I told him that you just have to watch things and work out where to put the trap, that’s all. He nodded so small you could only just see his chin moving up and down. “You’ve got it there, Billy,” he said.
你要设置一个陷阱，让它能马上杀死兔子。伤它的腿不好。兔子会叫上一晚上，扭成一团，接着在早上，它用眼睛看着你，想知道你为什么这样做，你却不得不杀死它。贝利先生说，他不相信我能在离镇子这么近的地方抓住它们。我告诉他，你只需要观察情况，找出放置陷阱的地方就行了。他点头的动作很微小，你只能看到他的下巴上下移动。“你找对了地方，比利。”他说。
　　
　　After he paid me we looked at the dogs and had a cup of tea. His dogs know me and why I come. Their eyes get different when they see me.
他付完钱，我们看着那些狗，喝了杯茶。他的狗认得我，知道我为什么来。当它们看到我，它们的眼睛变的不同了。

　　Lately, in the morning, everything is frozen. All up the hill are the gum trees and every time I look at them I think of that day in school when I was right and Mr. Fry was wrong. Mr. Fry showed us a picture and told us that trees lose their leaves in autumn, and the other kids started writing it down, but I felt the words come up, and I said no they don’t lose their leaves, they lose their bark. Mr. Fry said how typical it was that the one time I opened my mouth in class I’d come up with the wrong answer. Now I look at the trees standing bare in the mist and think about how I kept shaking my head when he told me to say I was wrong, and how the other kids sat smiling, staring down at their hands, waiting for after school like the dogs wait for the rabbits.

最近，在早上，所有的东西都被冻住了。山上全是橡胶树，每次我到它们，就想起了那天在学校,我是对的Fry先生错了的那次。Fry先生给我们看一幅图片，告诉我们树在秋天掉叶子，其他孩子把这话写下来，但我感到有话要说，我说不，它们不会掉叶子，他们掉树皮。Fry先生说，我一度在班级里开口说话，提出了一个错误的答案，这很典型。现在，我看到这些树赤裸裸的站在薄雾中，我回想起当他让我说我错了的时候，我怎么一直摇头，其他孩子怎么坐在那里笑，我一直盯着他们的手看，象狗等着兔子一样等着放学。


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上面几段有多处不太确定，先贴出来，晚上再来挑毛病

这话得从一个人口里说出来，要显得很合理，你平时正经这么说呀，怪别扭的。要把翻译代入到环境中去看。

真浪费和太浪费了，有啥本质上的区别么

真是赤果果的浪费啊