Chapter 11

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

-Ben Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack.

 

Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to the zero mark, not even at midday. Shadow wondered how people had survived this weather in the days before electricity, before thermal¹ face masks and lightweight thermal underwear, before easy travel.

He was down at the video, tanning, bait and tackle store, being shown Hinzelmann's hand-tied trout² flies. They were more interesting than he had expected: colorful fakes of life, made of feather and thread, each with a hook hidden inside it.

He asked Hinzelmann.

"For real?" asked Hinzelmann.

"For real," said Shadow.

"Well," said the older man. "Sometimes they didn't survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many people as the cold. But those days were hard-they'd spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it has to do with the sunlight, how there isn't enough of it in the winter. My daddy, he said folk just went stir crazy-winter madness they called it. Lakeside always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard. There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving girl hadn't tried to kill you by February she hadn't any backbone³.

"Storybooks were like gold dust-anything you could read was treasured, back before the town had a lending library. When my grampaw got sent a storybook from his brother in Bavaria, all the Germans in town met up in the town hall to hear him read it, and the Finns and the Irish and the rest of them, they'd make the Germans tell them the stories.

"Twenty miles south of here, in Jibway, they found a woman walking mother-naked in the winter with a dead babe at her breast, and she'd not suffer them to take it from her." He shook his head meditatively⁴, closed the fly cabinet with a click. "Bad business. You want a video rental⁵ card? Eventually they'll open a Blockbusters here, and then we'll soon be out of business. But for now we got a pretty fair selection."

Shadow reminded Hinzelmann that he had no television, and no VCR. He enjoyed Hinzelmann's company-the reminiscences, the tall tales, the goblin grin of the old man. It could make things awkward between them were Shadow to admit that television had made him uncomfortable ever since it had started to talk to him.

Hinzelmann fished in a drawer, and took out a tin box-by the look of it, it had once been a Christmas box, of the kind that contained chocolates or cookies: a mottled Santa Claus, holding a tray of Coca-Cola bottles, beamed up from its lid. Hinzelmann eased off the metal top of the box, revealing a notebook and books of blank tickets, and said, "How many you want me to put you down for?"

"How many of what?"

"Klunker tickets. She'll go out onto the ice today, so we've started selling tickets. Each ticket is five dollars, ten for forty, twenty for seventy-five. One ticket buys you five minutes. Of course we can't promise it'll go down in your five minutes, but the person who's closest stands to win five hundred bucks⁷, and if it goes down in your five minutes, you win a thousand dollars. The earlier you buy your tickets, the more times aren't spoken for. You want to see the info sheet?"

"Sure."

Hinzelmann handed Shadow a photocopied¹⁰ sheet. The klunker was an old car with its engine and fuel tank removed, which would be parked out on the ice for the winter. Sometime in the spring the lake ice would melt, and when it was too thin to bear the car's weight the car would fall into the lake. The earliest the klunker had ever tumbled into the lake was February the twenty-seventh ("That was the winter of 1998. I don't think you could rightly call that a winter at all"), the latest was May the first ("That was 1950. Seemed that year that the only way that winter would end was if somebody hammered a stake through its heart"). The beginning of April appeared to be the most common time for the car to sink-normally in midafternoon.

All of the midafternoons in April had already gone, marked off in Hinzelmann's lined notebook. Shadow bought a thirty-minute period on the morning of March 23, from 9:00 A.M. to 9:30 A.M. He handed Hinzelmann thirty dollars.

"I just wish everybody in town was as easy a sell as you are," said Hinzelmann.

"It's a thank-you for that ride you gave me that first night I was in town."

"No, Mike," said Hinzelmann. "It's for the children." For a moment he looked serious, with no trace of impishness on his creased¹¹ old face. "Come down this afternoon, you can lend a hand pushing the klunker out onto the lake."

He passed Shadow six blue cards, each with a date and time written on it in Hinzelmann's old-fashioned handwriting, then entered the details of each in his notebook.

"Hinzelmann," asked Shadow. "Have you ever heard of eagle stones?"

"Up north of Rhinelander? Nope, that's Eagle River. Can't say I have."

"How about thunderbirds?"

"Well, there was the Thunderbird Framing Gallery up on Fifth Street, but that closed down. I'm not helping¹², am I?"

"Nope."

"Tell you what, why don't you go look at the library. Good people, although they may be kind of distracted by the library sale on this week. I showed you where the library was, didn't I?"

Shadow nodded, and said so long. He wished he'd thought of the library himself. He got into the purple 4-Runner and drove south on Main Street, following the lake around to the southernmost point, until he reached the castlelike building that housed the city library. He walked inside. A sign pointed¹⁴ to the basement: LIBRARY SALE, it read. The library proper was on the ground floor, and he stamped the snow off his boots.

A forbidding woman with pursed, crimson¹⁵-colored lips asked him pointedly¹⁶ if she could help him.

"I guess I need a library card," he said. "And I want to know all about thunderbirds."

Native American Beliefs and Traditions were on a single shelf in one castlelike turret¹⁷. Shadow pulled down some books and sat in the window seat: In several minutes he had learned that thunderbirds were mythical¹⁸ gigantic birds who lived on mountaintops, who brought the lightning and who flapped their wings to make the thunder. There were some tribes, he read, who believed that the thunderbirds had made the world. Another half hour's reading did not turn up anything more, and he could find no mention of eagle stones anywhere in the books' indexes.

Shadow was putting the last of the books back on the shelf when he became aware of somebody staring at him. Someone small and grave was peeking¹⁹ at him from around the heavy shelves. As he turned to look, the face vanished. He turned his back on the boy, then glanced around to see that he was being watched once more.

In his pocket was the Liberty dollar. He took it out of his pocket and held it up in his right hand, making sure the boy could see it. He finger-palmed it into his left hand, displayed both hands empty, raised his left hand to his mouth and coughed once, letting the coin tumble from his left hand into his right.

The boy looked at him wide-eyed and scampered²¹ away, returning a few moments later, dragging an unsmiling Marguerite Olsen, who looked at Shadow suspiciously and said, "Hello, Mister Ainsel. Leon says you were doing magic for him."

"Just a little prestidigitation, ma'am. Say, I never did say thank you for your advice about heating the apartment. It's warm as toast in there right now."

"That's good." Her icy expression had not begun to thaw²².

"It's a lovely library," said Shadow.

"It's a beautiful building. But the city needs something more efficient and less beautiful. You going to the library sale downstairs?"

"I wasn't planning on it."

"Well, you should. It's for a good cause."

"I'll make a point of getting down there."

"Head out into the hall and then go downstairs. Good seeing you, Mister Ainsel."

"Call me Mike," he said.

She said nothing, just took Leon's hand and walked the boy over to the children's section.

"But Mom," Shadow heard Leon say, "It wasn't pressed igitation. It wasn't. I saw it vanish and then it fell out of his nose. I saw it."

An oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln gazed down from the wall at him. Shadow walked down the marble and oak steps to the library basement, through a door into a large room filled with tables, each table covered with books of all kinds, indiscriminately assorted²³ and promiscuously²⁴ arranged: paperbacks²⁶ and hardcovers, fiction and nonfiction, periodicals and encyclopedias²⁷ all side by side upon the tables, spines²⁹ up or spines out.

Shadow wandered to the back of the room where there was a table covered with old-looking leather-bound books, each with a catalog number painted in white on the spine²⁸. "You're the first person over in that corner all day," said the man sitting by the stack of empty boxes and bags and the small, open metal cashbox. "Mostly folk just take the thrillers³⁰ and the children's books and the Harlequin romances. Jenny Kerton, Danielle Steel, all that." The man was reading Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. "Everything on the tables is fifty cents a book, or you can take three for a dollar."

Shadow thanked him and continued to browse³¹. He found a copy of Herodotus's Histories bound in peeling brown leather. It made him think of the paperback²⁵ copy he had left behind in prison. There was a book called Perplexing Parlour Illusions, which looked like it might have some coin effects. He carried both the books over to the man with the cashbox.

"Buy one more, it's still a dollar," said the man. "And if you take another book away, you'll be doing us a favor. We need the shelf-space."

Shadow walked back to the old leather-bound books. He decided³² to liberate³³ the book that was least likely to be bought by anyone else, and found himself unable to decide between Common Diseases of the Urinary Tract¹³ with Illustrations by a Medical Doctor and Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872-1884. He looked at the illustrations in the medical book and decided that somewhere in the town there was a teenage boy who could use the book to gross out his friends. He took the Minutes to the man on the door, who took his dollar and put all the books into a Dave's Finest Food brown paper sack.

Shadow left the library. He had a clear view of the lake, all the way back. He could even see his apartment building, like a doll's house, up past the bridge. And there were men on the ice near the bridge, four or five of them, pushing a dark green car into the center of the white lake.

"March the twenty-third," Shadow said to the lake, under his breath. "Nine A.M. to nine-thirty A.M." He wondered if the lake or the klunker could hear him-and if they would pay any attention to him, even if they could. He doubted it.

The wind blew bitter against his face.

Officer Chad Mulligan was waiting outside Shadow's apartment when he got back. Shadow's heart began to pound when he saw the police car, to relax a little when he observed that the policeman was doing paperwork in the front seat.

He walked over to the car, carrying his paper sack of books.

Mulligan lowered his window. "Library sale?" he said.

"Yes."

"I bought a box of Robert Ludlum books there two, three years back. Keep meaning to read them. My cousin swears by the guy. These days I figure if I ever get marooned³⁴ on a desert island and I got my box of Robert Ludlum books with me, I can catch up on my reading."

"Something particular I can do for you, Chief?"

"Not a darn thing, pal²⁰. Thought I'd stop by and see how you were settling in. You remember that Chinese saying, you save a man's life, you're responsible for him. Well, I'm not saying I saved your life last week. But I still thought I should check in. How's the Purple Gunther-mobile doing?"

"Good," said Shadow. "It's good. Running fine."

"Pleased to hear it."

"I saw my next-door neighbor in the library," said Shadow. "Miz Olsen. I was wondering..."

"What crawled up her butt³⁵ and died?"

"If you want to put it like that."

"Long story. You want to ride along for a spell, I'll tell you all about it."

Shadow thought about it for a moment. "Okay," he said. He got into the car, sat in the front passenger seat. Mulligan drove north of town. Then he turned off his lights and parked beside the road.

"Darren Olsen met Marge at U.W. Stevens Point and he brought her back north to Lakeside. She was a journalism³⁶ major. He was studying, shit, hotel management, something like that. When they got here, jaws³⁸ dropped. This was, what, thirteen, fourteen years ago. She was so beautiful...that black hair..." he paused. "Darren managed the Motel America over in Camden, twenty miles west of here. Except nobody ever seemed to want to stop in Camden and eventually the motel closed. They had two boys. At that time Sandy was eleven. The little one-Leon, is it?-was just a babe in arms.

"Darren Olsen wasn't a brave man. He'd been a good high school football player, but that was the last time he was flying high. Whatever. He couldn't find the courage to tell Margie that he'd lost his job. So for a month, maybe for two months, he'd drive off early in the morning, come home late in the evening complaining about the hard day he'd had at the motel."

"What was he doing?" asked Shadow.

"Mm. Couldn't say for certain. I reckon he was driving up to Ironwood, maybe down to Green Bay. Guess he started out as a job hunter. Pretty soon he was drinking the time away, getting stoned, more than probably meeting the occasional working girl for a little instant gratification. He could have been gambling³⁹. What I do know for certain is that he emptied out their joint⁴⁰ account in about ten weeks. It was only a matter of time before Margie figured out-there we go!"

He swung the car out, flicked⁴¹ on the siren and the lights, and scared the daylights out of a small man in a car with Iowa plates who had just come down the hill at seventy.

The rogue⁴² lowan ticketed, Mulligan returned to his story.

"Where was I? Okay. So Margie kicks him out, sues for divorce. It turned into a vicious custody⁴³ battle. That's what they call 'em when they get into People magazine. Vicious Custody Battle. She got the kids. Darren got visitation rights and precious little else. Now, back then Leon was pretty small. Sandy was older, a good kid, the kind of boy who worships his daddy. Wouldn't let Margie say nothing bad about him. They lost the house-had a nice place down on Daniels Road. She moved into the apartment. He left town. Came back every six months to make everybody miserable⁴⁴.

"This went on for a few years. He'd come back, spend money on the kids, leave Margie in tears. Most of us just started wishing he'd never come back at all. His mom and pop had moved to Florida when they retired⁴⁵, said they couldn't take another Wisconsin winter. So last year he came out, said he wanted to take the boys to Florida for Christmas. Margie said not a hope, told him to get lost. It got pretty unpleasant-at one point I had to go over there. Domestic dispute. By the time I got there Darren was standing⁴⁶ in the front yard shouting stuff, the boys were barely holding it together, Margie was crying.

"I told Darren he was shaping up for a night in the cells. I thought for a moment he was going to hit me, but he was sober enough not to do that. I gave him a ride down to the trailer park south of town, told him to shape up. That he'd hurt her enough...Next day he left town.

"Two weeks later, Sandy vanished. Didn't get onto the school bus. Told his best friend that he'd be seeing his dad soon, that Darren was bringing him a specially⁴⁷ cool present to make up for having missed Christmas in Florida. Nobody's seen him since. Noncustodial kidnappings are the hardest. It's tough to find a kid who doesn't want to be found, y'see?"

Shadow said that he did. He saw something else as well. Chad Mulligan was in love with Marguerite Olsen himself. He wondered if the man knew how obvious it was.

Mulligan pulled out once more, lights flashing, and pulled over some teenagers doing sixty. He didn't ticket them, "just put the fear of God in them."

***

That evening Shadow sat at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to transform a silver dollar into a penny. It was a trick he had found in Perplexing Parlour Illusions, but the instructions were infuriating, unhelpful and vague. Phrases like "then vanish the penny in the usual way," occurred every sentence or so. In this context, Shadow wondered, what was "the usual way"? A French drop? Sleeving it? Shouting "Oh my god, look out! A mountain lion!" and dropping the coin into his side pocket while the audience's attention was diverted?

He tossed his silver dollar into the air, caught it, remembering the moon and the woman who gave it to him, then he attempted the illusion. It didn't seem to work. He walked into the bathroom and tried it in front of the mirror, and confirmed that he was right. The trick as written simply didn't work. He sighed, dropped the coins in his pocket and sat down on the couch. He spread the cheap throw rug over his legs and flipped⁴⁸ open the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872-1884. The type, in two columns, was so small as to be almost unreadable. He flipped through the book, looking at the reproductions of the photographs of the period, at the several incarnations of the Lakeside City Council therein: long side whiskers and clay pipes and battered⁴⁹ hats and shiny hats, worn with faces that were, many of them, peculiarly familiar. He was unsurprised to see that the portly secretary of the 1882 city council was a Patrick Mulligan: shave him, make him lose twenty pounds and he'd be a dead ringer for Chad Mulligan, his-what, great-great-grandson? He wondered if Hinzelmann's pioneer grandfather was in the photographs, but it did not appear that he had been city council material. Shadow thought he had seen a reference to a Hinzelmann in the text, while flipping⁵¹ from photograph to photograph, but it eluded⁵² him when he leafed back for it, and the tiny type made Shadow's eyes ache.

He put the book down on his chest and realized his head was nodding. It would be foolish to fall asleep on the couch, he decided soberly. The bedroom was only a few feet away. On the other hand, the bedroom and the bed would still be there in five minutes, and anyway, he was not going to go to sleep, only to close his eyes for a moment...

Darkness roared.

He stood on an open plain. Beside him was the place from which he had once emerged, from which the earth had squeezed him. Stars were still falling from the sky and each star that touched the red earth became a man or a woman. The men had long black hair and high cheekbones. The women all looked like Marguerite Olsen. These were the star people.

They looked at him with dark, proud eyes.

"Tell me about the thunderbirds," said Shadow. "Please. It's not for me. It's for my wife."

One by one they turned their backs on him, and as he lost their faces they were gone, one with the landscape. But the last of them, her hair streaked⁵³ white on dark gray, pointed before she turned away, pointed into the wine-colored sky.

"Ask them yourself," she said. Summer lightning flickered⁵⁴, momentarily illuminating⁵⁵ the landscape from horizon to horizon.

There were high rocks near him, peaks and spires⁵⁷ of sandstone, and Shadow began to climb the nearest. The spire⁵⁶ was the color of old ivory. He grabbed at a handhold and felt it slice into his hand. It's bone, thought Shadow. Not stone. It's old dry bone.

It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began. Shadow continued to climb. His hands hurt. Bone popped and crushed and fragmented under his bare feet. The wind tugged⁵⁸ at him, and he pressed himself to the spire, and he continued to climb the tower.

It was made of only one kind of bone, he realized, repeated over and over. Each of the bones was dry and ball-like. He imagined that they might be the eggshells of some huge bird. But another flare⁵⁹ of lightning told him differently: they had holes for eyes, and they had teeth, which grinned without humor.

Somewhere birds were calling. Rain spattered his face.

He was hundreds of feet above the ground, clinging to the side of the tower of skulls⁶⁰, while flashes of lightning burned in the wings of the shadowy birds who circled the spire-enormous, black, condorlike birds, each with a ruff of white at its neck. They were huge, graceful⁶¹ birds, and the beats of their wings crashed like thunder on the night air.

They were circling the spire.

They must be fifteen, twenty feet from wingtip to wingtip, thought Shadow.

Then the first bird swung out of its glide⁶² toward him, blue lightning crackling in its wings. He pushed himself into a crevice⁶³ of skulls, hollow eye-holes stared at him, a clutter⁶⁴ of ivory teeth smiled at him, but he kept climbing, pulling himself up the mountain of skulls, every sharp edge cutting into his skin, feeling revulsion and terror and awe⁶.

Another bird came at him, and one hand-sized talon⁶⁵ sank into his arm.

He reached out and tried to grasp a feather from its wing-for if he returned to his tribe without a thunderbird's feather he would be disgraced, he would never be a man-but the bird pulled up, so that he could not grasp a feather. The thunderbird loosened its grip and swung back onto the wind. Shadow continued to climb.

There must be a thousand skulls, thought Shadow. A thousand thousand. And not all of them are human. He stood at last on the top of the spire, the great birds, the thunderbirds, circling him slowly, navigating⁶⁶ the gusts⁶⁷ of the storm with tiny flicks⁶⁸ of their wings.

He heard a voice, the voice of the buffalo⁶⁹ man, calling to him on the wind, telling him who the skulls belonged to...

The tower began to tumble, and the biggest bird, its eyes the blinding blue-white of forked lightning, plummeted⁷⁰ down toward him in a rush of thunder, and Shadow was falling, tumbling down the tower of skulls...

The telephone shrilled⁷¹. Shadow had not even known that it was connected. Groggy⁷², shaken, he picked it up.

"What the fuck," shouted Wednesday, angrier than Shadow had ever heard him, "what the almighty⁷³ flying fuck do you think you are playing at?"

"I was asleep," said Shadow into the receiver, stupidly.

"What do you think is the fucking point of stashing⁷⁵ you in a hiding place like Lakeside, if you're going to raise such a ruckus that not even a dead man could miss it?"

"I dreamed of thunderbirds..." said Shadow. "And a tower. Skulls..." It seemed to him very important to recount his dream.

"I know what you were dreaming. Everybody damn well knows what you were dreaming. Christ almighty. What's the point in hiding you, if you're going to start to fucking advertise?"

Shadow said nothing.

There was a pause at the other end of the telephone. "I'll be there in the morning," said Wednesday. It sounded like the anger had died down. "We're going to San Francisco. The flowers in your hair are optional." And the line went dead.

Shadow put the telephone down on the carpet, and sat up, stiffly. It was 6:00 A.M. and still night-dark outside. He got up from the sofa, shivering. He could hear the wind as it screamed across the frozen lake. And he could hear somebody nearby crying, only the thickness of a wall away. He was certain it was Marguerite Olsen, and her sobbing⁷⁶ was insistent⁷⁷ and low and heartbreaking.

Shadow walked into the bathroom and pissed, then went into his bedroom and closed the door, blocking off the sound of the crying woman. Outside the wind howled and wailed⁷⁹ as if it, too, was seeking a lost child.

***

San Francisco in January was unseasonably warm, warm enough that the sweat prickled on the back of Shadow's neck. Wednesday was wearing a deep blue suit, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles that made him look like an entertainment lawyer.

They were walking along Haight Street. The street people and the hustlers and the moochers watched them go by, and no one shook a paper cup of change at them, no one asked them for anything at all.

Wednesday's jaw³⁷ was set. Shadow had seen immediately that the man was still angry, and had asked no questions when the black Lincoln Town Car had pulled up outside the apartment that morning. They had not talked on the way to the airport. He had been relieved that Wednesday was in first class and he was back in coach.

Now it was late in the afternoon. Shadow, who had not been in San Francisco since he was a boy, who had only seen it since then as a background to movies, was astonished at how familiar it was, how colorful and unique the wooden houses, how steep the hills, how very much it didn't feel like anywhere else.

"It's almost hard to believe that this is in the same country as Lakeside," he said.

Wednesday glared at him. Then he said, "It's not. San Francisco isn't in the same country as Lakeside anymore than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis."

"Is that so?" said Shadow, mildly.

"Indeed it is. They may share certain cultural signifiers-money, a federal government, entertainment-it's the same land, obviously-but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the greenback, The Tonight Show, and McDonald's." They were approaching a park at the end of the road. "Be nice to the lady we are visiting. But not too nice."

"I'll be cool," said Shadow.

They stepped onto the grass.

A young girl, no older than fourteen, her hair dyed green and orange and pink, stared at them as they went by. She sat beside a dog, a mongrel, with a piece of string for a collar and a leash⁸⁰. She looked hungrier than the dog did. The dog yapped at them, then wagged its tail.

Shadow gave the girl a dollar bill. She stared at it as if she was not sure what it was. "Buy dog food with it," Shadow suggested. She nodded, and smiled.

"Let me put it bluntly," said Wednesday. "You must be very cautious around the lady we are visiting. She might take a fancy to you, and that would be bad."

"Is she your girlfriend or something?"

"Not for all the little plastic toys in China," said Wednesday, agreeably. His anger seemed to have dissipated, or perhaps to have been invested for the future. Shadow suspected that anger was the engine that made Wednesday run.

There was a woman sitting on the grass, under a tree, with a paper tablecloth⁸¹ spread in front of her, and a variety of Tupperware dishes on the cloth.

She was-not fat, no, far from fat: what she was, a word that Shadow had never had cause to use until now, was curvaceous. Her hair was so fair that it was white, the kind of platinum⁸²-blonde tresses that should have belonged to a long-dead movie starlet, her lips were painted crimson, and she looked to be somewhere between twenty-five and fifty.

As they reached her she was selecting from a plate of deviled eggs. She looked up as Wednesday approached her, put down the egg she had chosen, and wiped her hand. "Hello, you old fraud," she said, but she smiled as she said it, and Wednesday bowed low, took her hand, and raised it to his lips.

He said, "You look divine."

"How the hell else should I look?" she demanded, sweetly. "Anyway, you're a liar⁵⁰. New Orleans was such a mistake-I put on, what, thirty pounds there? I swear. I knew I had to leave when I started to waddle⁸³. The tops of my thighs⁸⁴ rub together when I walk now, can you believe that?" This last was addressed to Shadow. He had no idea what to say in reply, and felt a hot flush suffuse⁸⁵ his face. The woman laughed delightedly. "He's blushing! Wednesday, my sweet, you brought me a blusher. How perfectly⁸⁶ wonderful of you. What's he called?"

"This is Shadow," said Wednesday. He seemed to be enjoying Shadow's discomfort⁸⁷. "Shadow, say hello to Easter."

Shadow said something that might have been Hello, and the woman smiled at him again. He felt like he was caught in headlights-the blinding kind that poachers use to freeze deer before they shoot them. He could smell her perfume from where he was standing, an intoxicating⁸⁸ mixture of jasmine and honeysuckle, of sweet milk and female skin.

"So, how's tricks?" asked Wednesday.

The woman-Easter-laughed a deep and throaty laugh, full-bodied and joyous⁸⁹. How could you not like someone who laughed like that? "Everything's fine," she said. "How about you, you old wolf?"

"I was hoping to enlist⁹⁰ your assistance."

"Wasting your time."

"At least hear me out before dismissing me."

"No point. Don't even bother."

She looked at Shadow. "Please, sit down here and help yourself to some of this food. Here, take a plate and pile it high. It's all good. Eggs, roast chicken, chicken curry⁹¹, chicken salad, and over here is lapin-rabbit, actually, but cold rabbit is a delight, and in that bowl over there is the jugged hare-well, why don't I just fill a plate for you?" And she did, taking a plastic plate, piling it high with food, and passing it to him. Then she looked at Wednesday. "Are you eating?" she asked.

"I am at your disposal, my dear," said Wednesday.

"You," she told him, "are so full of shit it's a wonder your eyes don't turn brown." She passed him an empty plate. "Help yourself," she said.

The afternoon sun at her back burned her hair into a platinum aura. "Shadow," she said, chewing a chicken leg with gusto. "That's a sweet name. Why do they call you Shadow?"

Shadow licked his lips to moisten them. "When I was a kid," he said. "We lived, my mother and I, we were, I mean, she was, well, like a secretary, at a bunch of U.S. embassies, we went from city to city all over northern Europe. Then she got sick and had to take early retirement⁹² and we came back to the States. I never knew what to say to the other kids, so I'd just find adults and follow them around, not saying anything. I just needed the company, I guess. I don't know. I was a small kid."

"You grew," she said.

"Yes," said Shadow. "I grew."

She turned back to Wednesday, who was spooning down a bowl of what looked like cold gumbo. "Is this the boy who's got everybody so upset?"

"You heard?"

"I keep my ears pricked⁹³ up," she said. Then to Shadow, "You keep out of their way. There are too many secret societies out there, and they have no loyalties⁹⁴ and no love. Commercial, independent, government, they're all in the same boat. They range from the barely competent to the deeply dangerous. Hey, old wolf, I heard a joke you'd like the other day. How do you know the CIA wasn't involved in the Kennedy assassination⁹⁵?"

"I've heard it," said Wednesday.

"Pity." She turned her attention back to Shadow. "But the spook show, the ones you met, they're something else. They exist because everyone knows they must exist." She drained a paper cup of something that looked like white wine, and then she got to her feet. "Shadow's a good name," she said. "I want a mochaccino. Come on."

She began to walk away. "What about the food?" asked Wednesday. "You can't just leave it here."

She smiled at him, and pointed to the girl sitting by the dog, and then extended her arms to take in the Haight and the World. "Let it feed them," she said, and she walked, with Wednesday and Shadow trailing behind her.

"Remember," she said to Wednesday, as they walked, "I'm rich. I'm doing just peachy. Why should I help you?"

"You're one of us," he said. "You're as forgotten and as unloved and unremembered as any of us. It's pretty clear whose side you should be on."

They reached a sidewalk coffeehouse, went inside, sat down. There was only one waitress, who wore her eyebrow⁹⁶ ring as a mark of caste, and a woman making coffee behind the counter. The waitress advanced upon them, smiling automatically, sat them down, took their orders.

Easter put her slim hand on the back of Wednesday's square gray hand. "I'm telling you," she said, "I'm doing fine. On my festival days they still feast on eggs and rabbits, on candy and on flesh, to represent rebirth and copulation. They wear flowers in their bonnets⁹⁷ and they give each other flowers. They do it in my name. More and more of them every year. In my name, old wolf."

"And you wax fat and affluent⁹⁸ on their worship and their love?" he said, dryly.

"Don't be an asshole." Suddenly she sounded very tired. She sipped⁹⁹ her mochaccino.

"Serious question, m'dear. Certainly I would agree that millions upon millions of them give each other tokens in your name, and that they still practice all the rites¹⁰⁰ of your festival, even down to hunting for hidden eggs. But how many of them know who you are? Eh? Excuse me, miss?" This to their waitress.

She said, "You need another espresso?"

"No, my dear. I was just wondering if you could solve a little argument we were having over here. My friend and I were disagreeing over what the word 'Easter' means. Would you happen to know?"

The girl stared at him as if green toads¹⁰¹ had begun to push their way between his lips. Then she said, "I don't know about any of that Christian¹⁰² stuff. I'm a pagan."

The woman behind the counter said, "I think it's like Latin or something for 'Christ has risen,' maybe."

"Really?" said Wednesday.

"Yeah, sure," said the woman. "Easter. Just like the sun rises in the east, you know."

"The risen son. Of course-a most logical supposition." The woman smiled and returned to her coffee grinder. Wednesday looked up at their waitress. "I think I shall have another espresso, if you do not mind. And tell me, as a pagan, who do you worship?"

"Worship?"

"That's right. I imagine you must have a pretty wide-open field. So to whom do you set up your household altar? To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray at dawn and at dusk?"

Her lips described several shapes without saying anything before she said, "The female principle. It's an empowerment thing. You know?"

"Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name?"

"She's the goddess within us all," said the girl with the eyebrow ring, color rising to her cheek. "She doesn't need a name."

"Ah," said Wednesday, with a wide monkey grin, "so do you have mighty⁷⁴ bacchanals in her honor? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon while scarlet¹⁰³ candles burn in silver candleholders? Do you step naked into the seafoam, chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards¹⁰⁴?"

"You're making fun of me," she said. "We don't do any of that stuff you were saying." She took a deep breath. Shadow suspected she was counting to ten. "Any more coffees here? Another mochaccino for you, ma'am?" Her smile was a lot like the one she had greeted them with when they had entered.

They shook their heads, and the waitress turned to greet another customer.

"There," said Wednesday, "is one who 'does not have the faith and will not have the fun,' Chesterton. Pagan indeed. So. Shall we go out onto the street, Easter my dear, and repeat the exercise? Find out how many passers by know that their Easter festival takes its name from Eostre of the Dawn? Let's see-I have it. We shall ask a hundred people. For every one that knows the truth, you may cut off one of my fingers, and when I run out of them, toes; for every twenty who don't know, you spend a night making love to me. And the odds¹⁰⁵ are certainly in your favor here-this is San Francisco, after all. There are heathens and pagans and Wiccans aplenty on these precipitous streets."

Her green eyes looked at Wednesday. They were, Shadow decided, the exact same color as a leaf in spring with the sun shining through it. She said nothing.

"We could try it," continued Wednesday. "But I would end up with ten fingers, ten toes, and five nights in your bed. So don't tell me they worship you and keep your festival day. They mouth your name, but it has no meaning to them. Nothing at all."

Tears stood out in her eyes. "I know that," she said, quietly. "I'm not a fool."

"No," said Wednesday. "You're not."

He's pushed her too far, thought Shadow.

Wednesday looked down, ashamed. "I'm sorry," he said. Shadow could hear the real sincerity¹⁰⁶ in his voice. "We need you. We need your energy. We need your power. Will you fight beside us when the storm comes?"

She hesitated. She had a chain of blue forget-me-nots tattooed¹⁰⁷ around her left wrist.

"Yes," she said, after a while. "I guess I will."

I guess it's true what they say, thought Shadow. If you can fake sincerity, you've got it made. Then he felt guilty for thinking it.

Wednesday kissed his finger, touched it to Easter's cheek. He called their waitress over and paid for their coffees, counting out the money carefully, folding it over with the check and presenting it to her.

As she walked away, Shadow said, "Ma'am? Excuse me? I think you dropped this." He picked up a ten-dollar bill from the floor.

"No," she said, looking at the wrapped bills in her hand.

"I saw it fall, ma'am," said Shadow, politely. "You should count them."

She counted the money in her hand, looked puzzled, and said, "Jesus. You're right. I'm sorry." She took the ten-dollar bill from Shadow, and walked away.

Easter walked out onto the sidewalk with them. The light was just starting to fade. She nodded to Wednesday, then she touched Shadow's hand and said, "What did you dream about, last night?"

"Thunderbirds," he said. "A mountain of skulls."

She nodded. "And do you know whose skulls they were?"

"There was a voice," he said. "In my dream. It told me."

She nodded and waited.

He said, "It said they were mine. Old skulls of mine. Thousands and thousands of them."

She looked at Wednesday, and said, "I think this one's a keeper." She smiled her bright smile. Then she patted Shadow's arm and walked away down the sidewalk. He watched her go, trying-and failing-not to think of her thighs rubbing together as she walked.

In the taxi on the way to the airport, Wednesday turned to Shadow. "What the hell was that business with the ten dollars about?"

"You shortchanged her. It comes out of her wages if she's short."

"What the hell do you care?" Wednesday seemed genuinely irate¹⁰⁸.

Shadow thought for a moment. Then he said, "Well, I wouldn't want anyone to do it to me. She hadn't done anything wrong."

"No?" Wednesday stared off into the middle distance, and said, "When she was seven years old she shut a kitten in a closet. She listened to it mew for several days. When it ceased to mew, she took it out of the closet, put it into a shoebox, and buried it in the backyard. She wanted to bury something. She consistently steals from everywhere she works. Small amounts, usually. Last year she visited her grandmother in the nursing home to which the old woman is confined. She took an antique gold watch from her grandmother's bedside table, and then went prowling through several of the other rooms, stealing small quantities of money and personal effects from the twilight¹⁰⁹ folk in their golden years. When she got home she did not know what to do with her spoils, scared someone would come after her, so she threw everything away except the cash."

"I get the idea," said Shadow.

"She also has asymptomatic gonorrhea," said Wednesday. "She suspects she might be infected but does nothing about it. When her last boyfriend accused her of having given him a disease she was hurt, offended, and refused to see him again."

"This isn't necessary," said Shadow. "I said I get the idea. You could do this to anyone, couldn't you? Tell me bad things about them."

"Of course," agreed Wednesday. "They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive."

"And that makes it okay for you to steal ten bucks from her?"

Wednesday paid the taxi and the two men walked into the airport, wandered up to their gate. Boarding had not yet begun. Wednesday said, "What the hell else can I do? They don't sacrifice rams¹¹⁰ or bulls to me. They don't send me the souls of killers¹¹¹ and slaves, gallows-hung and raven-picked. They made me. They forgot me. Now I take a little back from them. Isn't that fair?"

"My mom used to say, 'Life isn't fair,' " said Shadow.

"Of course she did," said Wednesday. "It's one of those things that moms say, right up there with 'If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too?' "

"You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks," said Shadow, doggedly¹¹². "It was the right thing to do."

Someone announced that their plane was boarding. Wednesday stood up. "May your choices always be so clear," he said.

***

The cold snap was easing when Wednesday dropped Shadow off in the small hours of the morning. It was still obscenely cold in Lakeside, but it was no longer impossibly cold. The lighted sign on the side of the M&I Bank flashed alternately 3:30 A.M. and -5°F as they drove through the town.

It was 9:30 A.M. when Chief of Police Chad Mulligan knocked on the apartment door and asked Shadow if he knew a girl named Alison McGovern.

"I don't think so," said Shadow, sleepily.

"This is her picture," said Mulligan. It was a high school photograph. Shadow recognized the person in the picture immediately: the girl with the blue rubber-band braces¹¹⁴ on her teeth, the one who had been learning all about the oral uses of Alka-Seltzer from her friend.

"Oh, yeah. Okay. She was on the bus when I came into town."

"Where were you yesterday, Mister Ainsel?"

Shadow felt his world begin to spin away from him. He knew he had nothing to feel guilty about (You're a parole-violating felon¹¹⁵ living under an assumed name, whispered a calm voice in his mind. Isn't that enough?).

"San Francisco," he said. "California. Helping my uncle transport a four-poster bed."

"You got any ticket stubs? Anything like that?"

"Sure." He had both his boarding pass stubs in his back pocket, pulled them out. "What's going on?"

Chad Mulligan examined the boarding passes. "Alison McGovern's vanished. She helped out up at the Lakeside Humane¹¹⁶ Society. Feed animals, walk dogs. She'd come out for a few hours after school. So. Dolly Knopf, who runs the Humane Society, she'd always run her home when they closed up for the night. Yesterday Alison never got there."

"She's vanished."

"Yup. Her parents called us last night. Silly kid used to hitchhike up to the Humane Society. It's out on County W, pretty isolated¹¹⁷. Her parents told her not to, but this isn't the kind of place where things happen...people here don't lock their doors, you know? And you can't tell kids. So, look at the photo again."

Alison McGovern was smiling. The rubber bands on her teeth in the photograph were red, not blue.

"You can honestly say you didn't kidnap her, rape¹¹⁸ her, murder her, anything like that?"

"I was in San Francisco. And I wouldn't do that shit."

"That was what I figured, pal. So you want to come help us look for her?"

"Me?"

"You. We've had the K-9 guys out this morning-nothing so far." He sighed. "Heck, Mike. I just hope she turns up in the Twin Cities with some dopey boyfriend."

"You think it's likely?"

"I think it's possible. You want to join the hunting party?"

Shadow remembered seeing the girl in Hennings Farm and Home Supplies, the flash of a shy blue-braced smile, how beautiful he had known she was going to be, one day. "I'll come," he said.

There were two dozen men and women waiting in the lobby of the fire station. Shadow recognized Hinzelmann, and several other faces looked familiar. There were police officers, and some men and women in the brown uniforms of the Lumber¹¹⁹ County Sheriff's department.

Chad Mulligan told them what Alison was wearing when she vanished (a scarlet snowsuit, green gloves, blue woollen hat under the hood¹²⁰ of her snowsuit) and divided the volunteers into groups of three. Shadow, Hinzelmann, and a man named Brogan comprised one of the groups. They were reminded how short the daylight period was, told that if, God forbid, they found Alison's body they were not repeat not to disturb anything, just to radio back for help, but that if she was alive they were to keep her warm until help came.

They were dropped off out on County W. Hinzelmann, Brogan, and Shadow walked along the edge of a frozen creek¹²¹. Each group of three had been issued a small handheld walkie-talkie before they left.

The cloud cover was low, and the world was gray. No snow had fallen in the last thirty-six hours. Footprints stood out in the glittering crust of the crisp snow.

Brogan looked like a retired army colonel, with his slim mustache and white temples. He told Shadow he was a retired high school principal. "I wasn't getting any younger. These days I still teach a little, do the school play-that was always the high point of the year anyhow-and now I hunt a little and have a cabin down on Pike Lake, spend too much time there." As they set out Brogan said, "On the one hand, I hope we find her. On the other, if she's going to be found, I'd be very grateful if it was someone else who got to find her, and not us. You know what I mean?"

Shadow knew exactly what he meant.

The three men did not talk much. They walked, looking for a red snowsuit, or green gloves, or a blue hat, or a white body. Now and again Brogan, who had the walkie-talkie, would check in with Chad Mulligan.

At lunchtime they sat with the rest of the search party on a commandeered school bus and ate hot dogs and drank hot soup. Someone pointed out a red-tailed hawk¹²² in a bare tree, and someone else said that it looked more like a falcon¹²³, but it flew away and the argument was abandoned.

Hinzelmann told them a story about his grandfather's trumpet¹²⁴, and how he tried playing it during a cold snap, and the weather was so cold outside by the barn, where his grandfather had gone to practice, that no music came out.

"Then after he came inside he put the trumpet down by the woodstove to thaw. Well, the family're all in bed that night and suddenly the unfrozen tunes¹²⁵ start coming out of that trumpet. Scared my grandmother so much she nearly had kittens."

The afternoon was endless, unfruitful, and depressing. The daylight faded slowly: distances collapsed¹²⁶ and the world turned indigo¹²⁷ and the wind blew cold enough to burn the skin on your face. When it was too dark to continue, Mulligan radioed to them to call it off for the evening, and they were picked up and driven back to the fire station.

In the block next to the fire station was the Buck⁸ Stops Here Tavern¹²⁸, and that was where most of the searchers wound up. They were exhausted¹²⁹ and dispirited, talking to each other of how cold it had become, how more than likely Alison would show up in a day or so, no idea of how much trouble she'd caused everyone.

"You shouldn't think badly of the town because of this," said Brogan. "It is a good town."

"Lakeside," said a trim woman whose name Shadow had forgotten, if ever they'd been introduced, "is the best town in the North Woods. You know how many people are unemployed¹³⁰ in Lakeside?"

"No," said Shadow.

"Less than twenty," she said. "There's over five thousand people live in and around this town. We may not be rich, but everyone's working. It's not like the mining towns up in the northeast-most of them are ghost towns now. There were farming towns that were killed by the falling cost of milk, or the low price of hogs¹³². You know what the biggest cause of unnatural¹³³ death is among farmers in the Midwest?"

"Suicide?" Shadow hazarded.

She looked almost disappointed. "Yeah. That's it. They kill themselves." She shook her head. Then she continued, "There are too many towns hereabouts that only exist for the hunters and the vacationers, towns that just take their money and send them home with their trophies¹³⁴ and their bug¹³⁵ bites. Then there are the company towns, where everything's just hunky-dory until Wal-Mart relocates their distribution center or 3M stops manufacturing CD cases there or whatever and suddenly there's a boatload of folks who can't pay their mortgages. I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name."

"Ainsel," said Shadow. "Mike Ainsel." The beer he was drinking was a local brew¹³⁶, made with spring water. It was good.

"I'm Gallic Knopf," she said. "Dolly's sister." Her face was still ruddy from the cold. "So what I'm saying is that Lakeside's lucky. We've got a little of everything here-farm, light industry, tourism, crafts. Good schools."

Shadow looked at her in puzzlement. There was something empty at the bottom of all her words. It was as if he were listening to a salesman, a good salesman, who believed in his product, but still wanted to make sure you went home with all the brushes or the full set of encyclopedias. Perhaps she could see it in his face. She said "I'm sorry. When you love something you just don't want to stop talking about it. What do you do, Mister Ainsel?"

"My uncle buys and sells antiques all over the country. He uses me to move big, heavy things. It's a good job, but not steady work." A black cat, the bar mascot¹³⁷, wound between Shadow's legs, rubbing its forehead with his boot. It leapt up beside him onto the bench and went to sleep.

"At least you get to travel," said Brogan. "You do anything else?"

"You got eight quarters on you?" asked Shadow. Brogan fumbled¹³⁹ for his change. He found five quarters, pushed them across the table to Shadow. Gallic Knopf produced another three quarters.

He laid out the coins, four in each row. Then, with scarcely a fumble¹³⁸, he did the Coins Through the Table, appearing to drop half the coins through the wood of the table, from his left hand into his right.

After that, he took all eight coins in his right hand, an empty water glass in his left, covered the glass with a napkin and appeared to make the coins vanish one by one from his right hand and land in the glass beneath the napkin with an audible clink. Finally he opened his right hand to show it was empty, then swept the napkin away to show the coins in the glass.

He returned their coins-three to Gallic, five to Brogan-then took a quarter back from Brogan's hand, leaving four coins. He blew on it, and it was a penny, which he gave to Brogan, who counted his quarters and was dumbfounded to find that he still had all five in his hand.

"You're a Houdini," cackled Hinzelmann in delight. "That's what you are!"

"Just an amateur," said Shadow. "I've got a long way to go." Still, he felt a whisper of pride. They had been his first adult audience.

He stopped at the food store on the way home to buy a carton of milk. The ginger-haired girl at the checkout¹⁴⁰ counter looked familiar, and her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Her face was one big freckle¹⁴¹.

"I know you," said Shadow. "You're-" and he was about to say the Alka-Seltzer girl, but bit it back and finished, "you're Alison's friend. From the bus. I hope she's going to be okay."

She sniffed¹⁴² and nodded. "Me too." She blew her nose on a tissue, hard, and pushed it back into her sleeve.

Her badge said Hi! I'M SOPHIE! ASK ME HOW YOU CAN LOSE 20 LBS. IN 30 DAYS!

"I spent today looking for her. No luck yet."

Sophie nodded, blinked back tears. She waved the milk carton in front of a scanner and it chirped¹⁴³ its price at them. Shadow passed her two dollars.

"I'm leaving this fucking town," said the girl in a sudden, choked voice. "I'm going to live with my mom in Ashland. Alison's gone. Sandy Olsen went last year. Jo Ming the year before that. What if it's me next year?"

"I thought Sandy Olsen was taken by his father."

"Yes," said the girl, bitterly. "I'm sure he was. And Jo Ming went out to California, and Sarah Lindquist got lost on a trail hike and they never found her. Whatever. I want to go to Ashland."

She took a deep breath and held it for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled at him. There was nothing insincere about that smile. It was just, he guessed, that she had been told to smile when she gave somebody change. She told him to have a nice day. Then she turned to the woman with the full shopping cart behind him and began to unload and scan.

Shadow took his milk and drove away, past the gas station and the klunker on the ice, and over the bridge and home.

Coming to America
1778

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting.

That is the tale; the rest is detail.

There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look-here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: He is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes¹⁴⁵ attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously¹⁴⁶, as best he can. So, efficiently¹⁴⁷ and good-naturedly, he exterminates¹⁴⁸ Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify¹⁴⁹ them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers-many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews. There will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed¹⁵⁰ of its pests.

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally¹⁵¹, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes-forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.

Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people-but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing¹⁵² and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen¹⁵³, swollen belly¹⁵⁴, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended¹⁵⁵ caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad¹⁵⁶ squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

And the simple truth is this: There was a girl and her uncle sold her.

This is what they used to say, where the girl came from: no man may be certain who fathered a child, but the mother, ah, that you could be certain of. Lineage and property was something that moved in the matrilineal line, but power remained in the hands of the men: a man had complete ownership of his sister's children.

There was a war in that place, and it was a small war, no more than a skirmish between the men of two rival villages. It was almost an argument. One village won the argument, one village lost it.

Life as a commodity, people as possessions. Enslavement had been part of the culture of those parts for thousands of years. The Arab slavers had destroyed the last of the great kingdoms of East Africa, while the West African nations had destroyed each other.

There was nothing untoward¹⁵⁷ or unusual about their uncle selling the twins, although twins were considered magical beings, and their uncle was scared of them, scared enough that he did not tell them that they were to be sold in case they harmed his shadow and killed him. They were twelve years old. She was called Wututu, the messenger bird, he was called Agasu, the name of a dead king. They were healthy children, and, because they were twins, male and female, they were told many things about the gods, and because they were twins they listened to the things that they were told, and they remembered.

Their uncle was a fat and lazy man. If he had owned more cattle, perhaps he would have given up one of his cattle instead of the children, but he did not. He sold the twins. Enough of him: he shall not enter further into this narrative¹⁵⁸. We follow the twins.

They were marched, with several other slaves taken or sold in the war, for a dozen miles to a small outpost. Here they were traded, and the twins, along with thirteen others, were bought by six men with spears and knives who marched them to the west, toward the sea, and then for many miles along the coast. There were fifteen slaves now altogether, their hands loosely bound, tied neck to neck.

Wututu asked her brother Agasu what would happen to them.

"I do not know," he said. Agasu was a boy who smiled often: his teeth were white and perfect, and he showed them as he grinned, his happy smiles making Wututu happy in her turn. He was not smiling now. Instead he tried to show bravery for his sister, his head back and shoulders spread, as proud, as menacing, as comical as a puppy with its hackles raised.

The man in the line behind Wututu, his cheeks scarred, said, "They will sell us to the white devils, who will take us to their home across the water."

"And what will they do to us there?" demanded Wututu.

The man said nothing.

"Well?" asked Wututu. Agasu tried to dart¹⁵⁹ a glance over his shoulder. They were not allowed to talk or sing as they walked.

"It is possible they will eat us," said the man. "That is what I have been told. That is why they need so many slaves. It is because they are always hungry."

Wututu began to cry as she walked. Agasu said, "Do not cry, my sister. They will not eat you. I shall protect you. Our gods will protect you."

But Wututu continued to cry, walking with a heavy heart, feeling pain and anger and fear as only a child can feel it: raw and overwhelming. She was unable to tell Agasu that she was not worried about the white devils eating her. She would survive, she was certain of it. She cried because she was scared that they would eat her brother, and she was not certain that she could protect him.

They reached a trading post, and they were kept there for ten days. On the morning of the tenth day they were taken from the hut in which they had been imprisoned¹⁶⁰ (it had become very crowded in the final days, as men arrived from far away bringing their own strings¹⁶¹ and skeins of slaves). They were marched to the harbor, and Wututu saw the ship that was to take them away.

Her first thought was how big a ship it was, her second that it was too small for all of them to fit inside. It sat lightly on the water. The ship's boat came back and forth¹⁶², ferrying the captives to the ship, where they were manacled and arranged in low decks by sailors, some of whom were brick red or tan-skinned, with strange pointy noses and beards that made them look like beasts. Several of the sailors looked like her own people, like the men who had marched her to the coast. The men and the women and the children were separated, forced into different areas on the slave deck. There were too many slaves for the ship to hold easily, so another dozen men were chained up on the deck in the open, beneath the places where the crew would sling¹⁶³ their hammocks.

Wututu was put in with the children, not with the women; and she was not chained, merely locked in. Agasu, her brother, was forced in with the men, in chains, packed like herrings. It stank¹⁶⁴ under that deck, although the crew had scrubbed it down since their last cargo¹⁶⁵. It was a stink¹⁶⁶ that had entered the wood: the smell of fear and bile and diarrhea and death, of fever and madness and hate. Wututu sat in the hot hold with the other children. She could feel the children on each side of her sweating. A wave tumbled a small boy into her, hard, and he apologized in a tongue that Wututu did not recognize. She tried to smile at him in the semidarkness.

The ship set sail. Now it rode heavy in the water.

Wututu wondered about the place the white men came from (although none of them was truly white: sea-burned and sunburned they were, and their skins were dark). Were they so short of food that they had to send all the way to her land for people to eat? Or was it that she was to be a delicacy¹⁶⁷, a rare treat for a people who had eaten so many things that only black-skinned flesh in their cookpots made their mouths water?

On the second day out of port the ship hit a squall, not a bad one, but the ship's decks lurched and tumbled, and the smell of vomit¹⁶⁸ joined the mixed smells of urine and liquid feces and fear-sweat. Rain poured down on them in bucket-loads from the air gratings set in the ceiling of the slave deck.

A week into the voyage, and well out of sight of land, the slaves were allowed out of irons. They were warned that any disobedience, any trouble, and they would be punished more than they had ever imagined.

In the morning the captives were fed beans and ship's biscuits, and a mouthful each of vinegared lime juice, harsh enough that their faces would twist, and they would cough and splutter, and some of them would moan and wail⁷⁸ as the lime juice was spooned out. They could not spit it out, though: if they were caught spitting or dribbling¹⁶⁹ it out they were lashed¹¹³ or beaten.

The night brought them salted beef. It tasted unpleasant, and there was a rainbow sheen to the gray surface of the meat. That was at the start of the voyage. As the voyage continued, the meat grew worse.

When they could, Wututu and Agasu would huddle¹⁷⁰ together, talking of their mother and their home and their playfellows. Sometimes Wututu would tell Agasu the stories their mother had told them, like those of Elegba, the trickiest¹⁷¹ of the gods, who was Great Mawu's eyes and ears in the world, who took messages to Mawu and brought back Mawu's replies.

In the evenings, to while away the monotony of the voyage, the sailors would make the slaves sing for them and dance the dances of their native lands.

Wututu was lucky that she had been put in with the children. The children-were packed in tightly and ignored; the women were not always so fortunate. On some slave ships the female slaves were raped¹⁷² repeatedly by the crew, simply as an unspoken perquisite¹⁷³ of the voyage. This was not one of those ships, which is not to say that there were no rapes¹⁷⁴.

A hundred men, women, and children died on that voyage and were dropped over the side; and some of the captives who were dropped over the side had not yet died, but the green chill of the ocean cooled their final fever and they went down flailing¹⁷⁵, choking, lost.

Wututu and Agasu were traveling on a Dutch ship, but they did not know this, and it might as easily have been British, or Portuguese¹⁷⁶, or Spanish, or French.

The black crewmen on the ship, their skins even darker than Wututu's, told the captives where to go, what to do, when to dance. One morning Wututu caught one of the black guards staring at her. When she was eating, the man came over to her and stared down at her, without saying anything.

"Why do you do this?" she asked the man. "Why do you serve the white devils?"

He grinned at her as if her question was the funniest thing he had ever heard. Then he leaned over, so his lips were almost brushing her ears, so his hot breath on her ear made her suddenly feel sick. "If you were older," he told her, "I would make you scream with happiness from my penis. Perhaps I will do it tonight. I have seen how well you dance."

She looked at him with her nut-brown eyes and she said, unflinching, smiling even, "If you put it in me down there I will bite it off with my teeth down there. I am a witch girl, and I have very sharp teeth down there." She took pleasure in watching his expression change. He said nothing and walked away.

The words had come out of her mouth, but they had not been her words: she had not thought them or made them. No, she realized, those were the words of Elegba the trickster. Mawu had made the world and then, thanks to Elegba's trickery, had lost interest in it. It was Elegba of the clever ways and the iron-hard erection who had spoken through her, who had ridden her for a moment, and that night before she slept she gave thanks to Elegba.

Several of the captives refused to eat. They were whipped until they put food into their mouths and swallowed, although the whipping was severe enough that two men died of it. Still, no one else on the ship tried to starve themselves to freedom. A man and a woman tried to kill themselves by leaping over the side. The woman succeeded. The man was rescued and he was tied to the mast and lashed for the better part of a day, until his back ran with blood, and he was left there as the day became night. He was given no food to eat, and nothing to drink but his own piss. By the third day he was raving¹⁷⁷, and his head had swollen and grown soft, like an old melon. When he stopped raving they threw him over the side. Also, for five days following the escape attempt the captives were returned to their manacles and chains.

It was a long journey and a bad one for the captives, and it was not pleasant for the crew, although they had learned to harden their hearts to the business, and pretended to themselves that they were no more than farmers, taking their livestock¹⁷⁸ to the market.

They made harbor on a pleasant, balmy day in Bridgeport, Barbados, and the captives were carried from the ship to the shore in low boats sent out from the dock, and taken to the market square where they were, by dint¹⁷⁹ of a certain amount of shouting, and blows from cudgels, arranged into lines. A whistle blew, and the market square filled with men: poking¹⁸⁰, prodding¹⁸¹, red-faced men, shouting, inspecting, calling, appraising¹⁸², grumbling¹⁸³.

Wututu and Agasu were separated then. It happened so fast-a big man forced open Agasu's mouth, looked at his teeth, felt his arm muscles, nodded, and two other men hauled Agasu away. He did not fight them. He looked at Wututu and called, "Be brave," to her. She nodded, and then her vision smeared¹⁸⁴ and blurred¹⁸⁵ with tears, and she wailed. Together they were twins, magical, powerful. Apart they were two children in pain.

She never saw him again but once, and never in life.

This is what happened to Agasu. First they took him to a seasoning¹⁸⁶ farm, where they whipped him daily for the things he did and didn't do, they taught him a smattering of English and they gave him the name of Inky Jack¹⁸⁷, for the darkness of his skin. When he ran away they hunted him down with dogs and brought him back, and cut off a toe with a chisel¹⁸⁸, to teach him a lesson he would not forget. He would have starved himself to death, but when he refused to eat his front teeth were broken and thin gruel¹⁸⁹ was forced into his mouth, until he had no choice but to swallow or to choke.

Even in those times they preferred slaves born into captivity¹⁹⁰ to those brought over from Africa. The free-born slaves tried to run, or they tried to die, and either way, there went the profits.

When Inky Jack was sixteen he was sold, with several other slaves, to a sugar plantation¹⁹¹ on the island of St. Domingue. They called him Hyacinth, the big, broken-toothed slave. He met an old woman from his own village on that plantation-she had been a house slave before her fingers became too gnarled and arthritic-who told him that the whites intentionally¹⁹² split up captives from the same towns and villages and regions, to avoid insurrection and revolts. They did not like it when slaves spoke⁹ to each other in their own languages.

Hyacinth learned some French, and was taught a few of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Each day he cut sugar-cane from well before the sun rose until after the sun had set.

He fathered several children. He went with the other slaves, in the small hours of the night, to the woods, although it was forbidden, to dance the Calinda, to sing to Damballa-Wedo, the serpent god, in the form of a black snake. He sang to Elegba, to Ogu, Shango, Zaka, and to many others, all the gods the captives had brought with them to the island, brought in their minds and their secret hearts.

The slaves on the sugar plantations¹⁹³ of St. Domingue rarely lived more than a decade. The free time they were given-two hours in the heat of noon and five hours in the dark of the night (from eleven until four)-was also the only time they had to grow and tend the food they would eat (for they were not fed by their masters, merely given small plots of land to cultivate, with which to feed themselves), and it was also the time they had to sleep and to dream. Even so, they would take that time and they would gather and dance, and sing and worship. The soil of St. Domingue was a fertile soil and the gods of Dahomey and the Congo and the Niger put down thick roots there and grew lush and huge and deep, and they promised freedom to those who worshiped them at night in the groves¹⁹⁵.

Hyacinth was twenty-five years of age when a spider bit the back of his right hand. The bite became infected and the flesh on the back of his hand was necrotic: soon enough his whole arm was swollen and purple, and the hand stank. It throbbed¹⁹⁶ and it burned.

They gave him crude rum to drink, and they heated the blade of a machete in the fire until it glowed red and white. They cut his arm off at the shoulder with a saw, and they cauterized¹⁹⁷ it with the burning blade. He lay in a fever for a week. Then he returned to work.

The one-armed slave called Hyacinth took part in the slave revolt of 1791.

Elegba himself took possession of Hyacinth in the grove¹⁹⁴, riding him as a white man rode a horse, and spoke through him. He remembered little of what was said, but the others who were with him told him that he had promised them freedom from their captivity. He remembered only his erection, rodlike and painful; and raising both hands-the one he had, and the one he no longer possessed¹⁹⁸-to the moon.

A pig was killed, and the men and the women of that plantation drank the hot blood of the pig, pledging themselves and binding¹⁹⁹ themselves into a brotherhood²⁰⁰. They swore that they were an army of freedom, pledged themselves once more to the gods of all the lands from which they had been dragged as plunder²⁰¹.

"If we die in battle with the whites," they told each other, "we will be reborn in Africa, in our homes, in our own tribes."

There was another Hyacinth in the uprising, so they now called Agasu by the name of Big One-Arm. He fought, he worshiped, he sacrificed, he planned. He saw his friends and his lovers killed, and he kept fighting.

They fought for twelve years, a maddening, bloody²⁰² struggle with the plantation owners, with the troops brought over from France. They fought, and they kept fighting, and, impossibly, they won.

On January 1, 1804, the independence of St. Domingue, soon to be known to the world as the Republic of Haiti, was declared. Big One-Ann did not live to see it. He had died in August 1802, bayoneted by a French soldier.

At the precise moment of the death of Big One-Arm (who had once been called Hyacinth, and before that, Inky Jack, and who was forever in his heart Agasu), his sister, whom he had known as Wututu, who had been called Mary on her first plantation in the Carolinas, and Daisy when she had become a house slave, and Sukey when she was sold to the Lavere family down the river to New Orleans, felt the cold bayonet slide between her ribs²⁰³ and started to scream and weep uncontrollably. Her twin daughters woke and began to howl. They were cream-and-coffee colored, her new babies, not like the black children she had borne when she was on the plantation and little more than a girl herself-children she had not seen since they were fifteen and ten years old. The middle girl had been dead for a year, when she was sold away from them.

Sukey had been whipped many times since she had come ashore-once, salt had been rubbed into the wounds, on another occasion she had been whipped so hard and for so long that she could not sit, or allow anything to touch her back, for several days. She had been raped a number of times when younger: by black men who had been ordered to share her wooden palette, and by white men. She had been chained. She had not wept then, though. Since her brother had been taken from her she had only wept once. It was in North Carolina, when she had seen the food for the slave children and the dogs poured into the same trough, and she had seen her little children scrabbling with the dogs for the scraps²⁰⁴. She saw that happen one day-and she had seen it before, every day on that plantation, and she would see it again many times before she left-she saw it that one day and it broke her heart.

She had been beautiful for a while. Then the years of pain had taken their toll²⁰⁵, and she was no longer beautiful. Her face was lined, and there was too much pain in those brown eyes.

Eleven years earlier, when she was twenty-five, her right arm had withered²⁰⁶. None of the white folk had known what to make of it. The flesh seemed to melt from the bones, and now her right arm hung by her side, little more than a skeletal arm covered in skin, and almost immobile. After this she had become a house slave.

The Casterton family, who had owned the plantation, were impressed by her cooking and house skills, but Mrs. Casterton found the withered arm unsettling, and so she was sold to the Lavere family, who were out for a year from Louisiana: M. Lavere was a fat, cheerful man who was in need of a cook and a maid of all work, and who was not in the slightest repulsed²⁰⁷ by the slave Daisy's withered arm. When, a year later, they returned to Louisiana, slave Sukey went with them.

In New Orleans the women came to her, and the men also, to buy cures and love charms and little fetishes, black folks, yes, of course, but white folks too. The Lavere family turned a blind eye to it. Perhaps they enjoyed the prestige of having a slave who was feared and respected. They would not, however, sell her her freedom.

Sukey went into the bayou late at night, and she danced the Calinda and the Bamboula. Like the dancers of St. Domingue and the dancers of her native land, true dancers in the bayou had a black snake as their voudon; even so, the gods of her homeland and of the other African nations did not possess her people as they had possessed her brother and the folk of St. Domingue. She would still invoke²⁰⁸ them and call their names, to beg them for favors.

She listened when the white folk spoke of the revolt in St. Domingo (as they called it), and how it was doomed²⁰⁹ to fail-"Think of it! A cannibal land!"-and then she observed that they no longer spoke of it.

Soon, it seemed to her that they pretended that there never had been a place called St. Domingo, and as for Haiti, the word was never mentioned. It was as if the whole American nation had decided that they could, by an effort of belief, command a good-sized Caribbean island to no longer exist merely by willing it so.

A generation of Lavere children grew up under Sukey's watchful²¹⁰ eye. The youngest, unable to say "Sukey" as a child, had called her Mama Zouzou, and the name had stuck. Now the year was 1821, and Sukey was in her mid-fifties. She looked much older.

She knew more of the secrets than old Sanité Dédé, who sold candies in front of the Cabildo, more than Marie Saloppé, who called herself the voodoo queen: both were free women of color, while Mama Zouzou was a slave, and would die a slave, or so her master had said.

The young woman who came to her to find what had happened to her husband styled herself the Widow Paris. She was high-breasted and young and proud. She had African blood in her, and European blood, and Indian blood. Her skin was reddish, her hair was a gleaming black. Her eyes were black and haughty²¹¹. Her husband, Jacques Paris, was, perhaps, dead. He was three-quarters white as these things were calculated, and the bastard²¹² of a once-proud family, one of the many immigrants who had fled from St. Domingo, and as free-born as his striking young wife.

"My Jacques. Is he dead?" asked the Widow Paris. She was a hairdresser who went from home to home, arranging the coiffures of the elegant ladies of New Orleans before their demanding social engagements.

Mama Zouzou consulted the bones, then shook her head. "He is with a white woman, somewhere north of here," she said. "A white woman with golden hair. He is alive."

This was not magic. It was common knowledge in New Orleans just with whom Jacques Paris had run off, and the color of her hair.

Mama Zouzou was surprised to realize that the Widow Paris did not already know that her Jacques was sticking his quadroon little pipi into a pink-skinned girl up in Colfax every night. Well, on the nights that he was not so drunk that he could use it for nothing better than pissing. Perhaps she knew. Perhaps she had another reason for coming.

The Widow Paris came to see the old slave woman one or two times a week. After a month she brought gifts for the old woman: hair ribbons, and a seedcake, and a black rooster.

"Mama Zouzou," said the girl, "it is time for you to teach me what you know."

"Yes," said Mama Zouzou, who knew which way the wind blew. And besides, the Widow Paris had confessed that she had been born with webbed toes, which meant that she was a twin and she had killed her twin in the womb. What choice did Mama Zouzou have?

She taught the girl that two nutmegs hung upon a string around the neck until the string breaks will cure heart murmurs²¹³, while a pigeon that has never flown, cut open and laid on the patient's head, will draw a fever. She showed her how to make a wishing bag, a small leather bag containing thirteen pennies, nine cotton seeds and the bristles²¹⁴ of a black hog¹³¹, and how to rub the bag to make wishes come true.

The Widow Paris learned everything that Mama Zouzou told her. She had no real interest in the gods, though. Not really. Her interests were in the practicalities. She was delighted to learn that if you dip a live frog in honey and place it in an ants' nest, then, when the bones are cleaned and white, a close examination will reveal a flat, heart-shaped bone, and another with a hook on it: the bone with the hook on it must be hooked onto the garment of the one you wish to love you, while the heart-shaped bone must be kept safely (for if it is lost, your loved one will turn on you like an angry dog). Infallibly, if you do this, the one you love will be yours.

She learned that dried snake powder, placed in the face powder of an enemy, will produce blindness, and that an enemy can be made to drown herself by taking a piece of her underwear, turning it inside out, and burying it at midnight under a brick.

Mama Zouzou showed the Widow Paris the World Wonder Root, the great and the little roots of John the Conqueror²¹⁵, she showed her dragon's blood, and valerian and five-finger grass. She showed her how to brew waste-away tea, and follow-me-water and faire-Shingo water.

All these things and more Mama Zouzou showed the Widow Paris. Still, it was disappointing for the old woman. She did her best to teach her the hidden truths, the deep knowledge, to tell her of Papa 'Legba, of Mawu, of Aido-Hwedo the voudon serpent, and the rest, but the Widow Paris (I shall now tell you the name she was born with, and the name she later made famous: it was Marie Laveau. But this was not the great Marie Laveau, the one you have heard of, this was her mother, who eventually became the Widow Glapion), she had no interest in the gods of the distant land. If St. Domingo had been a lush black earth for the African gods to grow in, this land, with its corn and its melons, its crawfish and its cotton, was barren and infertile²¹⁶.

"She does not want to know," complained Mama Zouzou to Clémentine, her confidante, who took in the washing for many of the houses in that district, washing their curtains and coverlets. Clémentine had a blossom of burns on her cheek, and one of her children had been scalded to death when a copper¹⁴⁴ overturned.

"Then do not teach her," says Clémentine.

"I teach her, but she does not see what is valuable-all she sees is what she can do with it. I give her diamonds, but she cares only for pretty glass. I give her a demi-bouteille of the best claret and she drinks river water. I give her quail²¹⁷ and she wishes to eat only rat."

"Then why do you persist?" asks Clémentine.

Mama Zouzou shrugs²¹⁸ her thin shoulders, causing her withered arm to shake.

She cannot answer. She could say that she teaches because she is grateful to be alive, and she is: she has seen too many die. She could say that she dreams that one day the slaves will rise, as they rose (and were defeated) in LaPlace, but that she knows in her heart that without the gods of Africa, without the favor of 'Legba and Mawu, they will never overcome their white captors, will never return to their homelands.

When she woke, on that terrible night almost twenty years earlier, and felt the cold steel between her ribs, that was when Mama Zouzou's life had ended. Now she was someone who did not live, who simply hated. If you asked her about the hate she would have been unable to tell you about a twelve-year-old girl on a stinking²¹⁹ ship: that had scabbed over in her mind-there had been too many whippings and beatings, too many nights in manacles, too many partings, too much pain. She could have told you about her son, though, and how his thumb had been cut off when their master discovered the boy was able to read and to write. She could have told you of her daughter, twelve years old and already eight months pregnant by an overseer, and how they dug a hole in the red earth to take her daughter's pregnant belly, and then they whipped her until her back had bled. Despite the carefully dug hole, her daughter had lost her baby and her life on a Sunday morning, when all the white folks were in church...

Too much pain.

"Worship them," Mama Zouzou told the young Widow Paris in the bayou, one hour after midnight. They were both naked to the waist, sweating in the humid night, their skins given accents by the white moonlight.

The Widow Paris's husband, Jacques (whose own death, three years later, would have several remarkable²²⁰ features), had told Marie a little about the gods of St. Domingo, but she did not care. Power came from the rituals, not from the gods.

Together Mama Zouzou and the Widow Paris crooned and stamped and keened in the swamp. They were singing in the blacksnakes, the free woman of color and the slave woman with the withered arm.

"There is more to it than just you prosper²²¹, your enemies fail," said Mama Zouzou.

Many of the words of the ceremonies, words she knew once, words her brother had also known, these words had fled from her memory. She told pretty Marie Laveau that the words did not matter, only the tunes and the beats, and there, singing and tapping in the blacksnakes, in the swamp, she has an odd vision. She sees the beats of the songs, the Calinda beat, the Bamboula beat, all the rhythms of equatorial Africa spreading slowly across this midnight land until the whole country shivers and swings to the beats of the old gods whose realms she had left. And even that, she understands somehow, in the swamp, even that will not be enough.

She turns to pretty Marie and sees herself through Marie's eyes, a black-skinned old woman, her face lined, her bony arm hanging stiffly by her side, her eyes the eyes of one who has seen her children fight in the trough for food from the dogs. She saw herself, and she knew then for the first time the revulsion and the fear the younger woman had for her.

Then she laughed, and crouched²²², and picked up in her good hand a blacksnake as tall as a sapling and as thick as a ship's rope.

"Here," she said. "Here will be our voudon."

She dropped the unresisting snake into a basket that yellow Marie was carrying.

And then, in the moonlight, the second sight possessed her for a final time, and she saw her brother Agasu. He was not the twelve-year-old boy she had last seen in the Bridgeport market, but a huge man, bald and grinning with broken teeth, his back lined with deep scars. In one hand he held a machete. His right arm was barely a stump²²³.

She reached out her own good left hand.

"Stay, stay awhile," she whispered. "I will be there. I will be with you soon."

And Marie Paris thought the old woman was speaking to her.

1 thermal   

adj.热的，由热造成的；保暖的

参考例句：

• They will build another thermal power station.他们要另外建一座热能发电站。
• Volcanic activity has created thermal springs and boiling mud pools.火山活动产生了温泉和沸腾的泥浆池。

2 trout   

n.鳟鱼；鲑鱼(属)

参考例句：

• Thousands of young salmon and trout have been killed by the pollution.成千上万的鲑鱼和鳟鱼的鱼苗因污染而死亡。
• We hooked a trout and had it for breakfast.我们钓了一条鳟鱼，早饭时吃了。

3 backbone   

n.脊骨，脊柱，骨干；刚毅，骨气

参考例句：

• The Chinese people have backbone.中国人民有骨气。
• The backbone is an articulate structure.脊椎骨是一种关节相连的结构。

4 meditatively   

adv.冥想地

参考例句：

• The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. 老头儿沉思不语，看着那投镖板。 来自英汉文学
• "Well,'said the foreman, scratching his ear meditatively, "we do need a stitcher. “这--"工头沉思地搔了搔耳朵。 "我们确实需要一个缝纫工。 来自英汉文学 - 嘉莉妹妹

5 rental   

n.租赁，出租，出租业

参考例句：

• The yearly rental of her house is 2400 yuan.她这房子年租金是2400元。
• We can organise car rental from Chicago O'Hare Airport.我们可以安排提供从芝加哥奥黑尔机场出发的租车服务。

6 awe   

n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧

参考例句：

• The sight filled us with awe.这景色使我们大为惊叹。
• The approaching tornado struck awe in our hearts.正在逼近的龙卷风使我们惊恐万分。

7 bucks   

n.雄鹿( buck的名词复数 )；钱；（英国十九世纪初的）花花公子；（用于某些表达方式）责任v.（马等）猛然弓背跃起( buck的第三人称单数 )；抵制；猛然震荡；马等尥起后蹄跳跃

参考例句：

• They cost ten bucks. 这些值十元钱。
• They are hunting for bucks. 他们正在猎雄兔。 来自《简明英汉词典》

8 buck   

n.雄鹿，雄兔；v.马离地跳跃

参考例句：

• The boy bent curiously to the skeleton of the buck.这个男孩好奇地弯下身去看鹿的骸骨。
• The female deer attracts the buck with high-pitched sounds.雌鹿以尖声吸引雄鹿。

9 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

10 photocopied   

v.影印，照相复制（photocopy的过去式与过去分词形式）

参考例句：

• If neatly done, this field map can be photocopied and serve as a permanent map. 假如能精致地完成，这张野外图可以照象复制并作为永久性的地图。 来自辞典例句
• She photocopied the town plan. 她复印了一份城市规划图。 来自互联网

11 creased   

（使…）起折痕，弄皱( crease的过去式和过去分词 )； （皮肤）皱起，使起皱纹； 皱皱巴巴

参考例句：

• You've creased my newspaper. 你把我的报纸弄皱了。
• The bullet merely creased his shoulder. 子弹只不过擦破了他肩部的皮肤。

12 helping   

n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的

参考例句：

• The poor children regularly pony up for a second helping of my hamburger. 那些可怜的孩子们总是要求我把我的汉堡包再给他们一份。
• By doing this, they may at times be helping to restore competition. 这样一来, 他在某些时候,有助于竞争的加强。

13 tract   

n.传单，小册子，大片(土地或森林)

参考例句：

• He owns a large tract of forest.他拥有一大片森林。
• He wrote a tract on this subject.他曾对此写了一篇短文。

14 pointed   

adj.尖的，直截了当的

参考例句：

• He gave me a very sharp pointed pencil.他给我一支削得非常尖的铅笔。
• She wished to show Mrs.John Dashwood by this pointed invitation to her brother.她想通过对达茨伍德夫人提出直截了当的邀请向她的哥哥表示出来。

15 crimson   

n./adj.深(绯)红色(的)；vi.脸变绯红色

参考例句：

• She went crimson with embarrassment.她羞得满脸通红。
• Maple leaves have turned crimson.枫叶已经红了。

16 pointedly   

adv.尖地，明显地

参考例句：

• She yawned and looked pointedly at her watch. 她打了个哈欠，又刻意地看了看手表。
• The demand for an apology was pointedly refused. 让对方道歉的要求遭到了断然拒绝。 来自《简明英汉词典》

17 turret   

n.塔楼，角塔

参考例句：

• This ancient turret has attracted many visitors.这座古老的塔楼吸引了很多游客。
• The soldier scaled the wall of the fortress by turret.士兵通过塔楼攀登上了要塞的城墙。

18 mythical   

adj.神话的；虚构的；想像的

参考例句：

• Undeniably,he is a man of mythical status.不可否认，他是一个神话般的人物。
• Their wealth is merely mythical.他们的财富完全是虚构的。

19 peeking   

v.很快地看( peek的现在分词 )；偷看；窥视；微露出

参考例句：

• I couldn't resist peeking in the drawer. 我不由得偷看了一下抽屉里面。
• They caught him peeking in through the keyhole. 他们发现他从钥匙孔里向里窥视。 来自辞典例句

20 pal   

n.朋友，伙伴，同志；vi.结为友

参考例句：

• He is a pal of mine.他是我的一个朋友。
• Listen,pal,I don't want you talking to my sister any more.听着，小子，我不让你再和我妹妹说话了。

21 scampered   

v.蹦蹦跳跳地跑，惊惶奔跑( scamper的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The cat scampered away. 猫刺棱一下跑了。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• The rabbIt'scampered off. 兔子迅速跑掉了。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

22 thaw   

v.（使）融化，（使）变得友善；n.融化，缓和

参考例句：

• The snow is beginning to thaw.雪已开始融化。
• The spring thaw caused heavy flooding.春天解冻引起了洪水泛滥。

23 assorted   

adj.各种各样的，各色俱备的

参考例句：

• There's a bag of assorted sweets on the table.桌子上有一袋什锦糖果。
• He has always assorted with men of his age.他总是与和他年令相仿的人交往。

24 promiscuously   

adv.杂乱地，混杂地

参考例句：

• It promiscuously plunders other languages and delights in neologisms. 它杂乱地掠夺其它语言，并以增加新词为乐。 来自互联网
• It's like biology: an ecosystem where microbes are promiscuously swapping genes and traits, evolution speeds up. 就像生物学：一个一群微生物混杂地交换基因和特性的生态系统，进化加速了。 来自互联网

25 paperback   

n.平装本，简装本

参考例句：

• A paperback edition is now available at bookshops.平装本现在在书店可以买到。
• Many books that are out of print are reissued in paperback form.许多绝版的书籍又以平装本形式重新出现。

26 paperbacks   

n.平装本，平装书( paperback的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• This shop only sells paperbacks. 这家书店只出售平装本的书。 来自辞典例句
• Other paperbacks were selling for ten or 15 cents each. 其它的平装书每本才卖十或十五美分。 来自互联网

27 encyclopedias   

n.百科全书， （某一学科的）专科全书( encyclopedia的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• However, some encyclopedias can be found on the Web. 同时，一些百科全书能也在网络上找到。 来自互联网
• Few people think of encyclopedias as creative enterprises; but they are. 鲜少有人想到百科全书是创意的工作，但它确实是。 来自互联网

28 spine   

n.脊柱，脊椎；(动植物的)刺；书脊

参考例句：

• He broke his spine in a fall from a horse.他从马上跌下摔断了脊梁骨。
• His spine developed a slight curve.他的脊柱有点弯曲。

29 spines   

n.脊柱( spine的名词复数 )；脊椎；（动植物的）刺；书脊

参考例句：

• Porcupines use their spines to protect themselves. 豪猪用身上的刺毛来自卫。
• The cactus has spines. 仙人掌有刺。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

30 thrillers   

n.紧张刺激的故事( thriller的名词复数 )；戏剧；令人感到兴奋的事；（电影）惊悚片

参考例句：

• He has written seven thrillers, and clearly enjoys intellectual pursuits. 他已经写了7本惊悚小说，显然很喜欢这样的智力活动。 来自辞典例句
• Most Americans prefer to read fast-moving adventure stories that we call "thrillers". 大部分美国人喜欢看我们称之为"惊险小说"的情节多变的冒险故事。 来自辞典例句

31 browse   

vi.随意翻阅，浏览；(牛、羊等)吃草

参考例句：

• I had a browse through the books on her shelf.我浏览了一下她书架上的书。
• It is a good idea to browse through it first.最好先通篇浏览一遍。

32 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

33 liberate   

v.解放，使获得自由，释出，放出；vt.解放，使获自由

参考例句：

• They did their best to liberate slaves.他们尽最大能力去解放奴隶。
• This will liberate him from economic worry.这将消除他经济上的忧虑。

34 marooned   

adj.被围困的；孤立无援的；无法脱身的

参考例句：

• During the storm we were marooned in a cabin miles from town. 在风暴中我们被围困在离城数英里的小屋内。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
• Five couples were marooned in their caravans when the River Avon broke its banks. 埃文河决堤的时候，有5对夫妇被困在了他们的房车里。 来自辞典例句

35 butt   

n.笑柄；烟蒂；枪托；臀部；v.用头撞或顶

参考例句：

• The water butt catches the overflow from this pipe.大水桶盛接管子里流出的东西。
• He was the butt of their jokes.他是他们的笑柄。

36 journalism   

n.新闻工作，报业

参考例句：

• He's a teacher but he does some journalism on the side.他是教师，可还兼职做一些新闻工作。
• He had an aptitude for journalism.他有从事新闻工作的才能。

37 jaw   

n.颚，颌，说教，流言蜚语；v.喋喋不休，教训

参考例句：

• He delivered a right hook to his opponent's jaw.他给了对方下巴一记右钩拳。
• A strong square jaw is a sign of firm character.强健的方下巴是刚毅性格的标志。

38 jaws   

n.口部；嘴

参考例句：

• The antelope could not escape the crocodile's gaping jaws. 那只羚羊无法从鱷鱼张开的大口中逃脱。
• The scored jaws of a vise help it bite the work. 台钳上有刻痕的虎钳牙帮助它紧咬住工件。

39 gambling   

n.赌博；投机

参考例句：

• They have won a lot of money through gambling.他们赌博赢了很多钱。
• The men have been gambling away all night.那些人赌了整整一夜。

40 joint   

adj.联合的，共同的；n.关节，接合处；v.连接，贴合

参考例句：

• I had a bad fall,which put my shoulder out of joint.我重重地摔了一跤，肩膀脫臼了。
• We wrote a letter in joint names.我们联名写了封信。

41 flicked   

（尤指用手指或手快速地）轻击( flick的过去式和过去分词 )； （用…）轻挥； （快速地）按开关； 向…笑了一下（或瞥了一眼等）

参考例句：

• She flicked the dust off her collar. 她轻轻弹掉了衣领上的灰尘。
• I idly picked up a magazine and flicked through it. 我漫不经心地拿起一本杂志翻看着。

42 rogue   

n.流氓；v.游手好闲

参考例句：

• The little rogue had his grandpa's glasses on.这淘气鬼带上了他祖父的眼镜。
• They defined him as a rogue.他们确定他为骗子。

43 custody   

n.监护，照看，羁押，拘留

参考例句：

• He spent a week in custody on remand awaiting sentence.等候判决期间他被还押候审一个星期。
• He was taken into custody immediately after the robbery.抢劫案发生后，他立即被押了起来。

44 miserable   

adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的

参考例句：

• It was miserable of you to make fun of him.你取笑他，这是可耻的。
• Her past life was miserable.她过去的生活很苦。

45 retired   

adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的

参考例句：

• The old man retired to the country for rest.这位老人下乡休息去了。
• Many retired people take up gardening as a hobby.许多退休的人都以从事园艺为嗜好。

46 standing   

n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的

参考例句：

• After the earthquake only a few houses were left standing.地震过后只有几幢房屋还立着。
• They're standing out against any change in the law.他们坚决反对对法律做任何修改。

47 specially   

adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地

参考例句：

• They are specially packaged so that they stack easily.它们经过特别包装以便于堆放。
• The machine was designed specially for demolishing old buildings.这种机器是专为拆毁旧楼房而设计的。

48 flipped   

轻弹( flip的过去式和过去分词 )； 按（开关）； 快速翻转； 急挥

参考例句：

• The plane flipped and crashed. 飞机猛地翻转，撞毁了。
• The carter flipped at the horse with his whip. 赶大车的人扬鞭朝着马轻轻地抽打。

49 battered   

adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损

参考例句：

• He drove up in a battered old car.他开着一辆又老又破的旧车。
• The world was brutally battered but it survived.这个世界遭受了惨重的创伤,但它还是生存下来了。

50 liar   

n.说谎的人

参考例句：

• I know you for a thief and a liar!我算认识你了，一个又偷又骗的家伙！
• She was wrongly labelled a liar.她被错误地扣上说谎者的帽子。

51 flipping   

讨厌之极的

参考例句：

• I hate this flipping hotel! 我讨厌这个该死的旅馆！
• Don't go flipping your lid. 别发火。

52 eluded   

v.（尤指机敏地）避开( elude的过去式和过去分词 )；逃避；躲避；使达不到

参考例句：

• The sly fox nimbly eluded the dogs. 那只狡猾的狐狸灵活地躲避开那群狗。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• The criminal eluded the police. 那个罪犯甩掉了警察的追捕。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

53 streaked   

adj.有条斑纹的，不安的v.快速移动( streak的过去式和过去分词 )；使布满条纹

参考例句：

• The children streaked off as fast as they could. 孩子们拔脚飞跑 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
• His face was pale and streaked with dirt. 他脸色苍白，脸上有一道道的污痕。 来自辞典例句

54 flickered   

（通常指灯光）闪烁，摇曳( flicker的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The lights flickered and went out. 灯光闪了闪就熄了。
• These lights flickered continuously like traffic lights which have gone mad. 这些灯象发狂的交通灯一样不停地闪动着。

55 illuminating   

a.富于启发性的，有助阐明的

参考例句：

• We didn't find the examples he used particularly illuminating. 我们觉得他采用的那些例证启发性不是特别大。
• I found his talk most illuminating. 我觉得他的话很有启发性。

56 spire   

n.(教堂)尖顶，尖塔，高点

参考例句：

• The church spire was struck by lightning.教堂的尖顶遭到了雷击。
• They could just make out the spire of the church in the distance.他们只能辨认出远处教堂的尖塔。

57 spires   

n.（教堂的） 塔尖，尖顶( spire的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Her masts leveled with the spires of churches. 船的桅杆和教堂的塔尖一样高。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• White church spires lift above green valleys. 教堂的白色尖顶耸立在绿色山谷中。 来自《简明英汉词典》

58 tugged   

v.用力拉，使劲拉，猛扯( tug的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• She tugged at his sleeve to get his attention. 她拽了拽他的袖子引起他的注意。
• A wry smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. 他的嘴角带一丝苦笑。 来自《简明英汉词典》

59 flare   

v.闪耀，闪烁；n.潮红；突发

参考例句：

• The match gave a flare.火柴发出闪光。
• You need not flare up merely because I mentioned your work.你大可不必因为我提到你的工作就动怒。

60 skulls   

颅骨( skull的名词复数 )； 脑袋； 脑子； 脑瓜

参考例句：

• One of the women's skulls found exceeds in capacity that of the average man of today. 现已发现的女性颅骨中，其中有一个的脑容量超过了今天的普通男子。
• We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight! 我们便能令月光下的平原变白，遍布白色的骷髅！

61 graceful   

adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的

参考例句：

• His movements on the parallel bars were very graceful.他的双杠动作可帅了!
• The ballet dancer is so graceful.芭蕾舞演员的姿态是如此的优美。

62 glide   

n./v.溜，滑行；(时间)消逝

参考例句：

• We stood in silence watching the snake glide effortlessly.我们噤若寒蝉地站着，眼看那条蛇逍遥自在地游来游去。
• So graceful was the ballerina that she just seemed to glide.那芭蕾舞女演员翩跹起舞，宛如滑翔。

63 crevice   

n.(岩石、墙等)裂缝；缺口

参考例句：

• I saw a plant growing out of a crevice in the wall.我看到墙缝里长出一棵草来。
• He edged the tool into the crevice.他把刀具插进裂缝里。

64 clutter   

n.零乱，杂乱；vt.弄乱，把…弄得杂乱

参考例句：

• The garage is in such a clutter that we can't find anything.车库如此凌乱，我们什么也找不到。
• We'll have to clear up all this clutter.我们得把这一切凌乱的东西整理清楚。

65 talon   

n.爪；（如爪般的）手指；爪状物

参考例句：

• Can you get a little tighter with the talon?你能不能把摄像探头固定住不动？
• This kind of spice is made of eagle's talon and has a unique flavor.这种香料味道独特，是用鹰爪作原料制成的。

66 navigating   

v.给（船舶、飞机等）引航，导航( navigate的现在分词 )；（从海上、空中等）横越；横渡；飞跃

参考例句：

• These can also be very useful when navigating time-based documents, such as video and audio. 它对于和时间有关的文档非常有用，比如视频和音频文档。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
• Vehicles slowed to a crawl on city roads, navigating slushy snow. 汽车在市区路上行驶缓慢，穿越泥泞的雪地。 来自互联网

67 gusts   

一阵强风( gust的名词复数 )； （怒、笑等的）爆发； （感情的）迸发； 发作

参考例句：

• Her profuse skirt bosomed out with the gusts. 她的宽大的裙子被风吹得鼓鼓的。
• Turbulence is defined as a series of irregular gusts. 紊流定义为一组无规则的突风。

68 flicks   

（尤指用手指或手快速地）轻击( flick的第三人称单数 )； （用…）轻挥； （快速地）按开关； 向…笑了一下（或瞥了一眼等）

参考例句：

• 'I shall see it on the flicks, I suppose.' “电影上总归看得见。” 来自英汉文学
• Last night to the flicks. 昨晚看了场电影。 来自英汉文学

69 buffalo   

n.(北美)野牛；(亚洲)水牛

参考例句：

• Asian buffalo isn't as wild as that of America's. 亚洲水牛比美洲水牛温顺些。
• The boots are made of buffalo hide. 这双靴子是由水牛皮制成的。

70 plummeted   

v.垂直落下，骤然跌落( plummet的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Share prices plummeted to an all-time low. 股票价格暴跌到历史最低点。
• A plane plummeted to earth. 一架飞机一头栽向地面。 来自《简明英汉词典》

71 shrilled   

（声音）尖锐的，刺耳的，高频率的( shrill的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Behind him, the telephone shrilled. 在他身后，电话铃刺耳地响了起来。
• The phone shrilled, making her jump. 电话铃声刺耳地响起，惊得她跳了起来。

72 groggy   

adj.体弱的；不稳的

参考例句：

• The attack of flu left her feeling very groggy.她患流感后非常虚弱。
• She was groggy from surgery.她手术后的的情况依然很不稳定。

73 almighty   

adj.全能的，万能的；很大的，很强的

参考例句：

• Those rebels did not really challenge Gods almighty power.这些叛徒没有对上帝的全能力量表示怀疑。
• It's almighty cold outside.外面冷得要命。

74 mighty   

adj.强有力的；巨大的

参考例句：

• A mighty force was about to break loose.一股巨大的力量即将迸发而出。
• The mighty iceberg came into view.巨大的冰山出现在眼前。

75 stashing   

v.贮藏( stash的现在分词 )；隐藏；藏匿；藏起

参考例句：

76 sobbing   

<主方>Ⅰ adj.湿透的

参考例句：

• I heard a child sobbing loudly. 我听见有个孩子在呜呜地哭。
• Her eyes were red with recent sobbing. 她的眼睛因刚哭过而发红。

77 insistent   

adj.迫切的，坚持的

参考例句：

• There was an insistent knock on my door.我听到一阵急促的敲门声。
• He is most insistent on this point.他在这点上很坚持。

78 wail   

vt./vi.大声哀号，恸哭；呼啸，尖啸

参考例句：

• Somewhere in the audience an old woman's voice began plaintive wail.观众席里，一位老太太伤心地哭起来。
• One of the small children began to wail with terror.小孩中的一个吓得大哭起来。

79 wailed   

v.哭叫，哀号( wail的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• She wailed over her father's remains. 她对着父亲的遗体嚎啕大哭。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• The women of the town wailed over the war victims. 城里的妇女为战争的死难者们痛哭。 来自辞典例句

80 leash   

n.牵狗的皮带，束缚；v.用皮带系住

参考例句：

• I reached for the leash,but the dog got in between.我伸手去拿系狗绳，但被狗挡住了路。
• The dog strains at the leash,eager to be off.狗拼命地扯拉皮带，想挣脱开去。

81 tablecloth   

n.桌布，台布

参考例句：

• He sat there ruminating and picking at the tablecloth.他坐在那儿沉思，轻轻地抚弄着桌布。
• She smoothed down a wrinkled tablecloth.她把起皱的桌布熨平了。

82 platinum   

n.白金

参考例句：

• I'll give her a platinum ring.我打算送给她一枚白金戒指。
• Platinum exceeds gold in value.白金的价值高于黄金。

83 waddle   

vi.摇摆地走；n.摇摆的走路(样子)

参考例句：

• I am pregnant.I waddle awkwardly and my big stomach pressed against the weight of the world. 我怀孕了，我滑稽可笑地瞒珊而行，大肚子上压着全世界的重量。
• We waddle and hop and have lots of fun.我们走起路来摇摇摆摆，还一跳一跳的。我们的生活很有趣。

84 thighs   

n.股，大腿( thigh的名词复数 )；食用的鸡（等的）腿

参考例句：

• He's gone to London for skin grafts on his thighs. 他去伦敦做大腿植皮手术了。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The water came up to the fisherman's thighs. 水没到了渔夫的大腿。 来自《简明英汉词典》

85 suffuse   

v.(色彩等)弥漫，染遍

参考例句：

• A dull red flush suffused Selby's face.塞尔比的脸庞泛起了淡淡的红晕。
• The evening sky was suffused with crimson.黄昏时分天空红霞灿灿。

86 perfectly   

adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定。
• Everything that we're doing is all perfectly above board.我们做的每件事情都是光明正大的。

87 discomfort   

n.不舒服，不安，难过，困难，不方便

参考例句：

• One has to bear a little discomfort while travelling.旅行中总要忍受一点不便。
• She turned red with discomfort when the teacher spoke.老师讲话时她不好意思地红着脸。

88 intoxicating   

a. 醉人的,使人兴奋的

参考例句：

• Power can be intoxicating. 权力能让人得意忘形。
• On summer evenings the flowers gave forth an almost intoxicating scent. 夏日的傍晚，鲜花散发出醉人的芳香。

89 joyous   

adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的

参考例句：

• The lively dance heightened the joyous atmosphere of the scene.轻快的舞蹈给这场戏渲染了欢乐气氛。
• They conveyed the joyous news to us soon.他们把这一佳音很快地传递给我们。

90 enlist   

vt.谋取(支持等)，赢得；征募；vi.入伍

参考例句：

• They come here to enlist men for the army.他们来这儿是为了召兵。
• The conference will make further efforts to enlist the support of the international community for their just struggle. 会议必将进一步动员国际社会，支持他们的正义斗争。

91 curry   

n.咖哩粉，咖哩饭菜；v.用咖哩粉调味，用马栉梳，制革

参考例句：

• Rice makes an excellent complement to a curry dish.有咖喱的菜配米饭最棒。
• Add a teaspoonful of curry powder.加一茶匙咖喱粉。

92 retirement   

n.退休，退职

参考例句：

• She wanted to enjoy her retirement without being beset by financial worries.她想享受退休生活而不必为金钱担忧。
• I have to put everything away for my retirement.我必须把一切都积蓄起来以便退休后用。

93 pricked   

刺，扎，戳( prick的过去式和过去分词 )； 刺伤； 刺痛； 使剧痛

参考例句：

• The cook pricked a few holes in the pastry. 厨师在馅饼上戳了几个洞。
• He was pricked by his conscience. 他受到良心的谴责。

94 loyalties   

n.忠诚( loyalty的名词复数 )；忠心；忠于…感情；要忠于…的强烈感情

参考例句：

• an intricate network of loyalties and relationships 忠诚与义气构成的盘根错节的网络
• Rows with one's in-laws often create divided loyalties. 与姻亲之间的矛盾常常让人两面为难。 来自《简明英汉词典》

95 assassination   

n.暗杀；暗杀事件

参考例句：

• The assassination of the president brought matters to a head.总统遭暗杀使事态到了严重关头。
• Lincoln's assassination in 1865 shocked the whole nation.1865年，林肯遇刺事件震惊全美国。

96 eyebrow   

n.眉毛，眉

参考例句：

• Her eyebrow is well penciled.她的眉毛画得很好。
• With an eyebrow raised,he seemed divided between surprise and amusement.他一只眉毛扬了扬，似乎既感到吃惊，又觉有趣。

97 bonnets   

n.童帽( bonnet的名词复数 )；（烟囱等的）覆盖物；（苏格兰男子的）无边呢帽；（女子戴的）任何一种帽子

参考例句：

• All the best bonnets of the city were there. 城里戴最漂亮的无边女帽的妇女全都到场了。 来自辞典例句
• I am tempting you with bonnets and bangles and leading you into a pit. 我是在用帽子和镯子引诱你，引你上钩。 来自飘（部分）

98 affluent   

adj.富裕的，富有的，丰富的，富饶的

参考例句：

• He hails from an affluent background.他出身于一个富有的家庭。
• His parents were very affluent.他的父母很富裕。

99 sipped   

v.小口喝，呷，抿( sip的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• He sipped his coffee pleasurably. 他怡然地品味着咖啡。
• I sipped the hot chocolate she had made. 我小口喝着她调制的巧克力热饮。 来自辞典例句

100 rites   

仪式，典礼( rite的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• to administer the last rites to sb 给某人举行临终圣事
• He is interested in mystic rites and ceremonies. 他对神秘的仪式感兴趣。

101 toads   

n.蟾蜍，癞蛤蟆( toad的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• All toads blink when they swallow. 所有的癞蛤蟆吞食东西时都会眨眼皮。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Toads have shorter legs and are generally more clumsy than frogs. 蟾蜍比青蛙脚短，一般说来没有青蛙灵活。 来自辞典例句

102 Christian   

adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒

参考例句：

• They always addressed each other by their Christian name.他们总是以教名互相称呼。
• His mother is a sincere Christian.他母亲是个虔诚的基督教徒。

103 scarlet   

n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的

参考例句：

• The scarlet leaves of the maples contrast well with the dark green of the pines.深红的枫叶和暗绿的松树形成了明显的对比。
• The glowing clouds are growing slowly pale,scarlet,bright red,and then light red.天空的霞光渐渐地淡下去了，深红的颜色变成了绯红，绯红又变为浅红。

104 leopards   

n.豹( leopard的名词复数 )；本性难移

参考例句：

• Lions, tigers and leopards are all cats. 狮、虎和豹都是猫科动物。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• For example, airlines never ship leopards and canaries on the same flight. 例如，飞机上从来不会同时运送豹和金丝雀。 来自英语晨读30分（初三）

105 odds   

n.让步，机率，可能性，比率；胜败优劣之别

参考例句：

• The odds are 5 to 1 that she will win.她获胜的机会是五比一。
• Do you know the odds of winning the lottery once?你知道赢得一次彩票的几率多大吗？

106 sincerity   

n.真诚，诚意；真实

参考例句：

• His sincerity added much more authority to the story.他的真诚更增加了故事的说服力。
• He tried hard to satisfy me of his sincerity.他竭力让我了解他的诚意。

107 tattooed   

v.刺青，文身( tattoo的过去式和过去分词 )；连续有节奏地敲击；作连续有节奏的敲击

参考例句：

• He had tattooed his wife's name on his upper arm. 他把妻子的名字刺在上臂上。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The sailor had a heart tattooed on his arm. 那水兵在手臂上刺上一颗心。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

108 irate   

adj.发怒的，生气

参考例句：

• The irate animal made for us,coming at a full jump.那头发怒的动物以最快的速度向我们冲过来。
• We have received some irate phone calls from customers.我们接到顾客打来的一些愤怒的电话

109 twilight   

n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期

参考例句：

• Twilight merged into darkness.夕阳的光辉融于黑暗中。
• Twilight was sweet with the smell of lilac and freshly turned earth.薄暮充满紫丁香和新翻耕的泥土的香味。

110 rams   

n.公羊( ram的名词复数 )；(R-)白羊（星）座；夯；攻城槌v.夯实（土等）( ram的第三人称单数 )；猛撞；猛压；反复灌输

参考例句：

• A couple of rams are butting at each other. 两只羊正在用角互相抵触。 来自辞典例句
• More than anything the rams helped to break what should have been on interminable marriage. 那些牡羊比任何东西都更严重地加速了他们那本该天长地久的婚姻的破裂。 来自辞典例句

111 killers   

凶手( killer的名词复数 )； 消灭…者； 致命物； 极难的事

参考例句：

• He remained steadfast in his determination to bring the killers to justice. 他要将杀人凶手绳之以法的决心一直没有动摇。
• They were professional killers who did in John. 杀死约翰的这些人是职业杀手。

112 doggedly   

adv.顽强地，固执地

参考例句：

• He was still doggedly pursuing his studies.他仍然顽强地进行着自己的研究。
• He trudged doggedly on until he reached the flat.他顽强地、步履艰难地走着，一直走回了公寓。

113 lashed   

adj.具睫毛的v.鞭打( lash的过去式和过去分词 )；煽动；紧系；怒斥

参考例句：

• The rain lashed at the windows. 雨点猛烈地打在窗户上。
• The cleverly designed speech lashed the audience into a frenzy. 这篇精心设计的演说煽动听众使他们发狂。 来自《简明英汉词典》

114 braces   

n.吊带，背带；托架( brace的名词复数 )；箍子；括弧；（儿童）牙箍v.支住( brace的第三人称单数 )；撑牢；使自己站稳；振作起来

参考例句：

• The table is shaky because the braces are loose. 这张桌子摇摇晃晃，因为支架全松了。
• You don't need braces if you're wearing a belt! 要系腰带，就用不着吊带了。

115 felon   

n.重罪犯；adj.残忍的

参考例句：

• He's a convicted felon.他是个已定罪的重犯。
• Hitler's early "successes" were only the startling depredations of a resolute felon.希特勒的早期“胜利 ”，只不过是一个死心塌地的恶棍出人意料地抢掠得手而已。

116 humane   

adj.人道的，富有同情心的

参考例句：

• Is it humane to kill animals for food?宰杀牲畜来吃合乎人道吗？
• Their aim is for a more just and humane society.他们的目标是建立一个更加公正、博爱的社会。

117 isolated   

adj.与世隔绝的

参考例句：

• His bad behaviour was just an isolated incident. 他的不良行为只是个别事件。
• Patients with the disease should be isolated. 这种病的患者应予以隔离。

118 rape   

n.抢夺，掠夺，强奸；vt.掠夺，抢夺，强奸

参考例句：

• The rape of the countryside had a profound ravage on them.对乡村的掠夺给他们造成严重创伤。
• He was brought to court and charged with rape.他被带到法庭并被指控犯有强奸罪。

119 lumber   

n.木材，木料；v.以破旧东西堆满；伐木；笨重移动

参考例句：

• The truck was sent to carry lumber.卡车被派出去运木材。
• They slapped together a cabin out of old lumber.他们利用旧木料草草地盖起了一间小屋。

120 hood   

n.头巾，兜帽，覆盖；v.罩上，以头巾覆盖

参考例句：

• She is wearing a red cloak with a hood.她穿着一件红色带兜帽的披风。
• The car hood was dented in.汽车的发动机罩已凹了进去。

121 creek   

n.小溪，小河，小湾

参考例句：

• He sprang through the creek.他跳过小河。
• People sunbathe in the nude on the rocks above the creek.人们在露出小溪的岩石上裸体晒日光浴。

122 hawk   

n.鹰，骗子；鹰派成员

参考例句：

• The hawk swooped down on the rabbit and killed it.鹰猛地朝兔子扑下来,并把它杀死。
• The hawk snatched the chicken and flew away.老鹰叼了小鸡就飞走了。

123 falcon   

n.隼，猎鹰

参考例句：

• The falcon was twice his size with pouted feathers.鹰张开羽毛比两只鹰还大。
• The boys went hunting with their falcon.男孩子们带着猎鹰出去打猎了。

124 trumpet   

n.喇叭，喇叭声；v.吹喇叭，吹嘘

参考例句：

• He plays the violin, but I play the trumpet.他拉提琴，我吹喇叭。
• The trumpet sounded for battle.战斗的号角吹响了。

125 tunes   

n.曲调，曲子( tune的名词复数 )v.调音( tune的第三人称单数 )；调整；（给收音机、电视等）调谐；使协调

参考例句：

• a potpourri of tunes 乐曲集锦
• When things get a bit too much, she simply tunes out temporarily. 碰到事情太棘手时，她干脆暂时撒手不管。 来自《简明英汉词典》

126 collapsed   

adj.倒塌的

参考例句：

• Jack collapsed in agony on the floor. 杰克十分痛苦地瘫倒在地板上。
• The roof collapsed under the weight of snow. 房顶在雪的重压下突然坍塌下来。

127 indigo   

n.靛青，靛蓝

参考例句：

• The sky was indigo blue,and a great many stars were shining.天空一片深蓝，闪烁着点点繁星。
• He slipped into an indigo tank.他滑落到蓝靛桶中。

128 tavern   

n.小旅馆，客栈；小酒店

参考例句：

• There is a tavern at the corner of the street.街道的拐角处有一家酒馆。
• Philip always went to the tavern,with a sense of pleasure.菲利浦总是心情愉快地来到这家酒菜馆。

129 exhausted   

adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的

参考例句：

• It was a long haul home and we arrived exhausted.搬运回家的这段路程特别长，到家时我们已筋疲力尽。
• Jenny was exhausted by the hustle of city life.珍妮被城市生活的忙乱弄得筋疲力尽。

130 unemployed   

adj.失业的，没有工作的；未动用的，闲置的

参考例句：

• There are now over four million unemployed workers in this country.这个国家现有四百万失业人员。
• The unemployed hunger for jobs.失业者渴望得到工作。

131 hog   

n.猪；馋嘴贪吃的人；vt.把…占为己有，独占

参考例句：

• He is greedy like a hog.他像猪一样贪婪。
• Drivers who hog the road leave no room for other cars.那些占着路面的驾驶员一点余地都不留给其他车辆。

132 hogs   

n.（尤指喂肥供食用的）猪( hog的名词复数 )；（供食用的）阉公猪；彻底地做某事；自私的或贪婪的人

参考例句：

• 'sounds like -- like hogs grunting. “像——像是猪发出的声音。 来自英汉文学 - 汤姆历险
• I hate the way he hogs down his food. 我讨厌他那副狼吞虎咽的吃相。 来自辞典例句

133 unnatural   

adj.不自然的；反常的

参考例句：

• Did her behaviour seem unnatural in any way?她有任何反常表现吗？
• She has an unnatural smile on her face.她脸上挂着做作的微笑。

134 trophies   

n.（为竞赛获胜者颁发的）奖品( trophy的名词复数 )；奖杯；（尤指狩猎或战争中获得的）纪念品；（用于比赛或赛跑名称）奖

参考例句：

• His football trophies were prominently displayed in the kitchen. 他的足球奖杯陈列在厨房里显眼的位置。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The hunter kept the lion's skin and head as trophies. 这猎人保存狮子的皮和头作为纪念品。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

135 bug   

n.虫子；故障；窃听器；vt.纠缠；装窃听器

参考例句：

• There is a bug in the system.系统出了故障。
• The bird caught a bug on the fly.那鸟在飞行中捉住了一只昆虫。

136 brew   

v.酿造，调制

参考例句：

• Let's brew up some more tea.咱们沏些茶吧。
• The policeman dispelled the crowd lest they should brew trouble.警察驱散人群，因恐他们酿祸。

137 mascot   

n.福神，吉祥的东西

参考例句：

• The football team's mascot is a goat.足球队的吉祥物是山羊。
• We had a panda as our mascot.我们把熊猫作为吉详物。

138 fumble   

vi.笨拙地用手摸、弄、接等，摸索

参考例句：

• His awkwardness made him fumble with the key.由于尴尬不安，他拿钥匙开锁时显得笨手笨脚。
• He fumbled his one-handed attempt to light his cigarette.他笨拙地想用一只手点燃香烟。

139 fumbled   

（笨拙地）摸索或处理（某事物）( fumble的过去式和过去分词 )； 乱摸，笨拙地弄； 使落下

参考例句：

• She fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief. 她在她口袋里胡乱摸找手帕。
• He fumbled about in his pockets for the ticket. 他（瞎）摸着衣兜找票。

140 checkout   

n.（超市等）收银台，付款处

参考例句：

• Could you pay at the checkout.你能在结帐处付款吗。
• A man was wheeling his shopping trolley to the checkout.一个男人正推着购物车向付款台走去。

141 freckle   

n.雀簧；晒斑

参考例句：

• The girl used many kinds of cosmetics to remove the freckle on her face.这个女孩用了很多种的化妆品来去掉她脸上的雀斑。
• Do you think a woman without freckle or having a whiter skin would be more attractive?你认为一位没有雀斑或肤色较白的女性会比较有吸引力？

142 sniffed   

v.以鼻吸气，嗅，闻( sniff的过去式和过去分词 )；抽鼻子（尤指哭泣、患感冒等时出声地用鼻子吸气）；抱怨，不以为然地说

参考例句：

• When Jenney had stopped crying she sniffed and dried her eyes. 珍妮停止了哭泣，吸了吸鼻子，擦干了眼泪。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The dog sniffed suspiciously at the stranger. 狗疑惑地嗅着那个陌生人。 来自《简明英汉词典》

143 chirped   

鸟叫，虫鸣( chirp的过去式 )

参考例句：

• So chirped fiber gratings have broad reflection bandwidth. 所以chirped光纤光栅具有宽的反射带宽，在反射带宽内具有渐变的群时延等其它类型的光纤光栅所不具备的特点。
• The crickets chirped faster and louder. 蟋蟀叫得更欢了。

144 copper   

n.铜；铜币；铜器；adj.铜(制)的；(紫)铜色的

参考例句：

• The students are asked to prove the purity of copper.要求学生们检验铜的纯度。
• Copper is a good medium for the conduction of heat and electricity.铜是热和电的良导体。

145 lavishes   

v.过分给予，滥施( lavish的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• Playing computer games all day lavishes parents' hard-earned money. 整天玩电脑游戏浪费父母的血汗钱。 来自互联网
• The development of space exploration lavishes the limited public funds. 发展太空探索会浪费有限的公共资金。 来自互联网

146 punctiliously   

参考例句：

• Given the circumstances, his behaviour to Laura had been punctiliously correct. 考虑当时的情况，他对劳拉的举止非常得体。 来自柯林斯例句

147 efficiently   

adv.高效率地，有能力地

参考例句：

• The worker oils the machine to operate it more efficiently.工人给机器上油以使机器运转更有效。
• Local authorities have to learn to allocate resources efficiently.地方政府必须学会有效地分配资源。

148 exterminates   

n.消灭，根绝( exterminate的名词复数 )v.消灭，根绝( exterminate的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• He exterminates some species on a large scale, but favours the multiplication of others. 他使有些物种大批消亡，却造成有利条件使另外一些物种成倍地增加。 来自互联网

149 pacify   

vt.使(某人)平静(或息怒)；抚慰

参考例句：

• He tried to pacify the protesters with promises of reform.他试图以改革的承诺安抚抗议者。
• He tried to pacify his creditors by repaying part of the money.他为安抚债权人偿还了部分借款。

150 cleansed   

弄干净，清洗( cleanse的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The nurse cleansed the wound before stitching it. 护士先把伤口弄干净后才把它缝合。
• The notorious Hell Row was burned down in a fire, and much dirt was cleansed away. 臭名远场的阎王路已在一场大火中化为乌有，许多焦土灰烬被清除一空。

151 literally   

adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实

参考例句：

• He translated the passage literally.他逐字逐句地翻译这段文字。
• Sometimes she would not sit down till she was literally faint.有时候，她不走到真正要昏厥了，决不肯坐下来。

152 numbing   

adj.使麻木的，使失去感觉的v.使麻木，使麻痹( numb的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• Watching television had a numbing effect on his mind. 看电视使他头脑麻木。
• It was numbing work, requiring patience and dedication. 这是一种令人麻木的工作，需要有耐心和忘我精神。 来自辞典例句

153 swollen   

adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀

参考例句：

• Her legs had got swollen from standing up all day.因为整天站着，她的双腿已经肿了。
• A mosquito had bitten her and her arm had swollen up.蚊子叮了她，她的手臂肿起来了。

154 belly   

n.肚子，腹部；(像肚子一样)鼓起的部分，膛

参考例句：

• The boss has a large belly.老板大腹便便。
• His eyes are bigger than his belly.他眼馋肚饱。

155 distended   

v.（使）膨胀，肿胀( distend的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• starving children with huge distended bellies 鼓着浮肿肚子的挨饿儿童
• The balloon was distended. 气球已膨胀。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

156 myriad   

adj.无数的；n.无数，极大数量

参考例句：

• They offered no solution for all our myriad problems.对于我们数不清的问题他们束手无策。
• I had three weeks to make a myriad of arrangements.我花了三个星期做大量准备工作。

157 untoward   

adj.不利的，不幸的，困难重重的

参考例句：

• Untoward circumstances prevent me from being with you on this festive occasion.有些不幸的事件使我不能在这欢庆的时刻和你在一起。
• I'll come if nothing untoward happens.我要是没有特殊情况一定来。

158 narrative   

n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的

参考例句：

• He was a writer of great narrative power.他是一位颇有记述能力的作家。
• Neither author was very strong on narrative.两个作者都不是很善于讲故事。

159 dart   

v.猛冲，投掷；n.飞镖，猛冲

参考例句：

• The child made a sudden dart across the road.那小孩突然冲过马路。
• Markov died after being struck by a poison dart.马尔科夫身中毒镖而亡。

160 imprisoned   

下狱，监禁( imprison的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• He was imprisoned for two concurrent terms of 30 months and 18 months. 他被判处30个月和18个月的监禁，合并执行。
• They were imprisoned for possession of drugs. 他们因拥有毒品而被监禁。

161 strings   

n.弦

参考例句：

• He sat on the bed,idly plucking the strings of his guitar.他坐在床上，随意地拨着吉他的弦。
• She swept her fingers over the strings of the harp.她用手指划过竖琴的琴弦。

162 forth   

adv.向前；向外，往外

参考例句：

• The wind moved the trees gently back and forth.风吹得树轻轻地来回摇晃。
• He gave forth a series of works in rapid succession.他很快连续发表了一系列的作品。

163 sling   

vt.扔；悬挂；n.挂带；吊索，吊兜；弹弓

参考例句：

• The boy discharged a stone from a sling.这个男孩用弹弓射石头。
• By using a hoist the movers were able to sling the piano to the third floor.搬运工人用吊车才把钢琴吊到3楼。

164 stank   

n. (英)坝，堰，池塘 动词stink的过去式

参考例句：

• Her breath stank of garlic. 她嘴里有股大蒜味。
• The place stank of decayed fish. 那地方有烂鱼的臭味。

165 cargo   

n.(一只船或一架飞机运载的)货物

参考例句：

• The ship has a cargo of about 200 ton.这条船大约有200吨的货物。
• A lot of people discharged the cargo from a ship.许多人从船上卸下货物。

166 stink   

vi.发出恶臭；糟透，招人厌恶；n.恶臭

参考例句：

• The stink of the rotten fish turned my stomach.腐烂的鱼臭味使我恶心。
• The room has awful stink.那个房间散发着难闻的臭气。

167 delicacy   

n.精致，细微，微妙，精良；美味，佳肴

参考例句：

• We admired the delicacy of the craftsmanship.我们佩服工艺师精巧的手艺。
• He sensed the delicacy of the situation.他感觉到了形势的微妙。

168 vomit   

v.呕吐，作呕；n.呕吐物，吐出物

参考例句：

• They gave her salty water to make her vomit.他们给她喝盐水好让她吐出来。
• She was stricken by pain and began to vomit.她感到一阵疼痛，开始呕吐起来。

169 dribbling   

n.（燃料或油从系统内）漏泄v.流口水( dribble的现在分词 )；（使液体）滴下或作细流；运球，带球

参考例句：

• Basic skills include swimming, dribbling, passing, marking, tackling, throwing, catching and shooting. 个人基本技术包括游泳、带球、传球、盯人、抢截、抛球、接球和射门。 来自互联网
• Carol: [Laurie starts dribbling again] Now do that for ten minutes. 卡罗：（萝莉开始再度运球）现在那样做十分钟。 来自互联网

170 huddle   

vi.挤作一团；蜷缩；vt.聚集；n.挤在一起的人

参考例句：

• They like living in a huddle.他们喜欢杂居在一起。
• The cold wind made the boy huddle inside his coat.寒风使这个男孩卷缩在他的外衣里。

171 trickiest   

adj.狡猾的( tricky的最高级 )；（形势、工作等）复杂的；机警的；微妙的

参考例句：

• Many believe this is the trickiest area to navigate. 很多人认为这是最难驾驭的领域。 来自时文部分
• Establishing confidence in a new monetary system was the trickiest part. 建立对新货币体系的信心是其最棘手的部分。 来自互联网

172 raped   

v.以暴力夺取，强夺( rape的过去式和过去分词 )；强奸

参考例句：

• A young woman was brutally raped in her own home. 一名年轻女子在自己家中惨遭强暴。 来自辞典例句
• We got stick together, or we will be having our women raped. 我们得团结一致，不然我们的妻女就会遭到蹂躏。 来自辞典例句

173 perquisite   

n.固定津贴，福利

参考例句：

• Perquisites include the use of the company car.福利包括可以使用公司的汽车。
• Politics in Britain used to be the perquisite of the property-owning classes.英国的政治以往是有产阶级的特权。

174 rapes   

n.芸苔( rape的名词复数 )；强奸罪；强奸案；肆意损坏v.以暴力夺取，强夺( rape的第三人称单数 )；强奸

参考例句：

• The man who had committed several rapes was arrested. 那个犯了多起强奸案的男人被抓起来了。 来自辞典例句
• The incidence of reported rapes rose 0.8 percent. 美国联邦调查局还发布了两份特别报告。 来自互联网

175 flailing   

v.鞭打( flail的现在分词 )；用连枷脱粒；（臂或腿）无法控制地乱动；扫雷坦克

参考例句：

• He became moody and unreasonable, flailing out at Katherine at the slightest excuse. 他变得喜怒无常、不可理喻，为点鸡毛蒜皮的小事就殴打凯瑟琳。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• His arms were flailing in all directions. 他的手臂胡乱挥舞着。 来自辞典例句

176 Portuguese   

n.葡萄牙人；葡萄牙语

参考例句：

• They styled their house in the Portuguese manner.他们仿照葡萄牙的风格设计自己的房子。
• Her family is Portuguese in origin.她的家族是葡萄牙血统。

177 raving   

adj.说胡话的；疯狂的，怒吼的；非常漂亮的；令人醉心[痴心]的v.胡言乱语(rave的现在分词)n.胡话；疯话adv.胡言乱语地；疯狂地

参考例句：

• The man's a raving lunatic. 那个男子是个语无伦次的疯子。
• When I told her I'd crashed her car, she went stark raving bonkers. 我告诉她我把她的车撞坏了时，她暴跳如雷。

178 livestock   

n.家畜，牲畜

参考例句：

• Both men and livestock are flourishing.人畜两旺。
• The heavy rains and flooding killed scores of livestock.暴雨和大水淹死了许多牲口。

179 dint   

n.由于，靠；凹坑

参考例句：

• He succeeded by dint of hard work.他靠苦干获得成功。
• He reached the top by dint of great effort.他费了很大的劲终于爬到了顶。

180 poking   

n. 刺，戳，袋 vt. 拨开，刺，戳 vi. 戳，刺，捅，搜索，伸出，行动散慢

参考例句：

• He was poking at the rubbish with his stick. 他正用手杖拨动垃圾。
• He spent his weekends poking around dusty old bookshops. 他周末都泡在布满尘埃的旧书店里。

181 prodding   

v.刺，戳( prod的现在分词 )；刺激；促使；（用手指或尖物）戳

参考例句：

• He needed no prodding. 他不用督促。
• The boy is prodding the animal with a needle. 那男孩正用一根针刺那动物。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

182 appraising   

v.估价( appraise的现在分词 )；估计；估量；评价

参考例句：

• At the appraising meeting, experts stated this method was superior to others. 鉴定会上，专家们指出这种方法优于其他方法。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• The teacher is appraising the students' work. 老师正在评定学生的作业。 来自辞典例句

183 grumbling   

adj. 喃喃鸣不平的, 出怨言的

参考例句：

• She's always grumbling to me about how badly she's treated at work. 她总是向我抱怨她在工作中如何受亏待。
• We didn't hear any grumbling about the food. 我们没听到过对食物的抱怨。

184 smeared   

弄脏； 玷污； 涂抹； 擦上

参考例句：

• The children had smeared mud on the walls. 那几个孩子往墙上抹了泥巴。
• A few words were smeared. 有写字被涂模糊了。

185 blurred   

v.（使）变模糊( blur的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）难以区分；模模糊糊；迷离

参考例句：

• She suffered from dizziness and blurred vision. 她饱受头晕目眩之苦。
• Their lazy, blurred voices fell pleasantly on his ears. 他们那种慢吞吞、含糊不清的声音在他听起来却很悦耳。 来自《简明英汉词典》

186 seasoning   

n.调味；调味料；增添趣味之物

参考例句：

• Salt is the most common seasoning.盐是最常用的调味品。
• This sauce uses mushroom as its seasoning.这酱油用蘑菇作调料。

187 jack   

n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克

参考例句：

• I am looking for the headphone jack.我正在找寻头戴式耳机插孔。
• He lifted the car with a jack to change the flat tyre.他用千斤顶把车顶起来换下瘪轮胎。

188 chisel   

n.凿子；v.用凿子刻，雕，凿

参考例句：

• This chisel is useful for getting into awkward spaces.这凿子在要伸入到犄角儿里时十分有用。
• Camille used a hammer and chisel to carve out a figure from the marble.卡米尔用锤子和凿子将大理石雕刻出一个人像。

189 gruel   

n.稀饭，粥

参考例句：

• We had gruel for the breakfast.我们早餐吃的是粥。
• He sat down before the fireplace to eat his gruel.他坐到壁炉前吃稀饭。

190 captivity   

n.囚禁；被俘；束缚

参考例句：

• A zoo is a place where live animals are kept in captivity for the public to see.动物园是圈养动物以供公众观看的场所。
• He was held in captivity for three years.他被囚禁叁年。

191 plantation   

n.种植园，大农场

参考例句：

• His father-in-law is a plantation manager.他岳父是个种植园经营者。
• The plantation owner has possessed himself of a vast piece of land.这个种植园主把大片土地占为己有。

192 intentionally   

ad.故意地，有意地

参考例句：

• I didn't say it intentionally. 我是无心说的。
• The local authority ruled that he had made himself intentionally homeless and was therefore not entitled to be rehoused. 当地政府裁定他是有意居无定所，因此没有资格再获得提供住房。

193 plantations   

n.种植园，大农场( plantation的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Soon great plantations, supported by slave labor, made some families very wealthy. 不久之后出现了依靠奴隶劳动的大庄园，使一些家庭成了富豪。 来自英汉非文学 - 政府文件
• Winterborne's contract was completed, and the plantations were deserted. 维恩特波恩的合同完成后，那片林地变得荒废了。 来自辞典例句

194 grove   

n.林子，小树林，园林

参考例句：

• On top of the hill was a grove of tall trees.山顶上一片高大的树林。
• The scent of lemons filled the grove.柠檬香味充满了小树林。

195 groves   

树丛，小树林( grove的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The early sun shone serenely on embrowned groves and still green fields. 朝阳宁静地照耀着已经发黄的树丛和还是一片绿色的田地。
• The trees grew more and more in groves and dotted with old yews. 那里的树木越来越多地长成了一簇簇的小丛林，还点缀着几棵老紫杉树。

196 throbbed   

抽痛( throb的过去式和过去分词 )； （心脏、脉搏等）跳动

参考例句：

• His head throbbed painfully. 他的头一抽一跳地痛。
• The pulse throbbed steadily. 脉搏跳得平稳。

197 cauterized   

v.（用腐蚀性物质或烙铁）烧灼以消毒( cauterize的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out. 你的心胸里有什么东西已经给掐死了，烧死了，腐蚀掉了。 来自英汉文学
• He cauterized the wound with a piece of red-hot iron. 他用一块烧红的烙铁烧灼伤口。 来自辞典例句

198 possessed   

adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的

参考例句：

• He flew out of the room like a man possessed.他像着了魔似地猛然冲出房门。
• He behaved like someone possessed.他行为举止像是魔怔了。

199 binding   

有约束力的，有效的，应遵守的

参考例句：

• The contract was not signed and has no binding force. 合同没有签署因而没有约束力。
• Both sides have agreed that the arbitration will be binding. 双方都赞同仲裁具有约束力。

200 brotherhood   

n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊

参考例句：

• They broke up the brotherhood.他们断绝了兄弟关系。
• They live and work together in complete equality and brotherhood.他们完全平等和兄弟般地在一起生活和工作。

201 plunder   

vt.劫掠财物，掠夺；n.劫掠物，赃物；劫掠

参考例句：

• The thieves hid their plunder in the cave.贼把赃物藏在山洞里。
• Trade should not serve as a means of economic plunder.贸易不应当成为经济掠夺的手段。

202 bloody   

adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染

参考例句：

• He got a bloody nose in the fight.他在打斗中被打得鼻子流血。
• He is a bloody fool.他是一个十足的笨蛋。

203 ribs   

n.肋骨( rib的名词复数 )；（船或屋顶等的）肋拱；肋骨状的东西；（织物的）凸条花纹

参考例句：

• He suffered cracked ribs and bruising. 他断了肋骨还有挫伤。
• Make a small incision below the ribs. 在肋骨下方切开一个小口。

204 scraps   

油渣

参考例句：

• Don't litter up the floor with scraps of paper. 不要在地板上乱扔纸屑。
• A patchwork quilt is a good way of using up scraps of material. 做杂拼花布棉被是利用零碎布料的好办法。

205 toll   

n.过路(桥)费；损失，伤亡人数；v.敲(钟)

参考例句：

• The hailstone took a heavy toll of the crops in our village last night.昨晚那场冰雹损坏了我们村的庄稼。
• The war took a heavy toll of human life.这次战争夺去了许多人的生命。

206 withered   

adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式

参考例句：

• The grass had withered in the warm sun. 这些草在温暖的阳光下枯死了。
• The leaves of this tree have become dry and withered. 这棵树下的叶子干枯了。

207 repulsed   

v.击退( repulse的过去式和过去分词 )；驳斥；拒绝

参考例句：

• I was repulsed by the horrible smell. 这种可怕的气味让我恶心。
• At the first brush,the enemy was repulsed. 敌人在第一次交火时就被击退了。 来自《简明英汉词典》

208 invoke   

v.求助于(神、法律)；恳求，乞求

参考例句：

• Let us invoke the blessings of peace.让我们祈求和平之福。
• I hope I'll never have to invoke this clause and lodge a claim with you.我希望我永远不会使用这个条款向你们索赔。

209 doomed   

命定的

参考例句：

• The court doomed the accused to a long term of imprisonment. 法庭判处被告长期监禁。
• A country ruled by an iron hand is doomed to suffer. 被铁腕人物统治的国家定会遭受不幸的。

210 watchful   

adj.注意的，警惕的

参考例句：

• The children played under the watchful eye of their father.孩子们在父亲的小心照看下玩耍。
• It is important that health organizations remain watchful.卫生组织保持警惕是极为重要的。

211 haughty   

adj.傲慢的，高傲的

参考例句：

• He gave me a haughty look and walked away.他向我摆出傲慢的表情后走开。
• They were displeased with her haughty airs.他们讨厌她高傲的派头。

212 bastard   

n.坏蛋，混蛋；私生子

参考例句：

• He was never concerned about being born a bastard.他从不介意自己是私生子。
• There was supposed to be no way to get at the bastard.据说没有办法买通那个混蛋。

213 murmurs   

n.低沉、连续而不清的声音( murmur的名词复数 )；低语声；怨言；嘀咕

参考例句：

• They spoke in low murmurs. 他们低声说着话。 来自辞典例句
• They are more superficial, more distinctly heard than murmurs. 它们听起来比心脏杂音更为浅表而清楚。 来自辞典例句

214 bristles   

短而硬的毛发，刷子毛( bristle的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• the bristles on his chin 他下巴上的胡楂子
• This job bristles with difficulties. 这项工作困难重重。

215 conqueror   

n.征服者，胜利者

参考例句：

• We shall never yield to a conqueror.我们永远不会向征服者低头。
• They abandoned the city to the conqueror.他们把那个城市丢弃给征服者。

216 infertile   

adj.不孕的；不肥沃的，贫瘠的

参考例句：

• Plants can't grow well in the infertile land.在贫瘠的土地上庄稼长不好。
• Nobody is willing to till this infertile land.这块薄田没有人愿意耕种。

217 quail   

n.鹌鹑；vi.畏惧，颤抖

参考例句：

• Cowards always quail before the enemy.在敌人面前，胆小鬼们总是畏缩不前的。
• Quail eggs are very high in cholesterol.鹌鹑蛋胆固醇含量高。

218 shrugs   

n.耸肩（以表示冷淡，怀疑等）( shrug的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany shrugs off this criticism. 匈牙利总理久尔恰尼对这个批评不以为然。 来自互联网
• She shrugs expressively and takes a sip of her latte. 她表达地耸肩而且拿她的拿铁的啜饮。 来自互联网

219 stinking   

adj.臭的，烂醉的，讨厌的v.散发出恶臭( stink的现在分词 )；发臭味；名声臭；糟透

参考例句：

• I was pushed into a filthy, stinking room. 我被推进一间又脏又臭的屋子里。
• Those lousy, stinking ships. It was them that destroyed us. 是的！就是那些该死的蠢猪似的臭飞船！是它们毁了我们。 来自英汉非文学 - 科幻

220 remarkable   

adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的

参考例句：

• She has made remarkable headway in her writing skills.她在写作技巧方面有了长足进步。
• These cars are remarkable for the quietness of their engines.这些汽车因发动机没有噪音而不同凡响。

221 prosper   

v.成功，兴隆，昌盛；使成功，使昌隆，繁荣

参考例句：

• With her at the wheel,the company began to prosper.有了她当主管，公司开始兴旺起来。
• It is my earnest wish that this company will continue to prosper.我真诚希望这家公司会继续兴旺发达。

222 crouched   

v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• He crouched down beside her. 他在她的旁边蹲了下来。
• The lion crouched ready to pounce. 狮子蹲下身，准备猛扑。

223 stump   

n.残株，烟蒂，讲演台；v.砍断，蹒跚而走

参考例句：

• He went on the stump in his home state.他到故乡所在的州去发表演说。
• He used the stump as a table.他把树桩用作桌子。