Loons

"The Loons"

Piquette Tonnerre was daughter of Lazarus. She had long black hair and her broad coarse-featured face bore on expression Piqutte was thirteen years old. She was older than Vanessa, but they were together in the same grade. Piquette failed several grades, because her attendance had always been sporadic and her interest in schoolwork was negligible. She missed a lot of school because she had tuberculosis of the bone, and had once spent months in hospital Piquette's voice was hoarse and she was limping when she was walking. She wore grimy cotton dresses that were always miles too long.

Jules Tonnerre built a small square cabin which was made of poplar poles and chinked with mud. He Built it about fifty years before, when he came back from Batoche with a bullet in his thigh. Jules had only intended to stay the winter in the Wachakwa Valley.

The cottage on Diamond Lake had a sign on the roadway bore in austere letters name MacLead. It was a large cottage; it was on the lakefront. Everything around the cottage were ferns, and sharp-branched raspberry bushes, and moss that had grown over fallen tree trunks. Above the backdoor there was the broad moose antlers that hung there.

Vanessa loved the summer at Diamond Lake because she loved to listen to the loons all night. She also loved because she would go swimming in the lake. Vanessa also loved to go there because she could spent more time with her father. For example; they would go at night to the lake to listen to the loons carefully because some day they can just disappear. She also loved it because she got to see her best friend Marvis.

Piquette wasn't actually interested in the surrounding and the loons or the lake. Most of her time she spent on the cottage with Beth helping to do the dishes or with Roddie. Every time when Vanessa asked her about the nanter she sounded like she didn't care about it or she didn't that she didn't know anything about nature.

Piquette reacted this way because she never used to go places like Diamond's Lake. She always had to do all the work at home; for example, she had to clean.

Vanessa Piquette four years later, one Saturday night when Mavis and her were having Cokes in the Regal Cafe. Piquette was seventeen but Vanessa thought she looked like twenty.