太阳神的牧牛

When I was in the second grade, I had an experience with trickery1 and dishonesty. And I learned an important lesson.

It was a fall day in 2006, at Randol Elementary School. We were having a break after math class. It was a rainy day, so we all ate our snacks inside. I had forgotten to bring the snack bar I brought every day, so I wandered around, and saw my classmate with a bag of cookies. There were double chocolate chip cookies with fudge2 on them. What kid could resist it? I went up to him and asked.

“Hey, can I have a cookie?”

“Yeah,” he responded immediately.

Now I should have been suspicious that he gave up his delicious cookies so quickly, but I was too hungry to raise any question. I put a cookie into my mouth, and muttered3 a “thanks”. After about 10 minutes, a yard duty woman came up to me and asked me.

“Is it true that you stole this young man’s cookies?”

No matter what I said, I couldn’t convince them that he had said I could have some cookies. As a punishment, I had to collect all the paper left on the floor from the previous day’s art project, and put it in the recycling bin. If I had actually stolen the cookies, this would have been a fair punishment. But since I was tricked into “stealing”his cookies, I felt that this punishment wasn’t just.

After that, I learned to trust only my friends, who didn’t have any malicious4 plans in store for me.

The Story of “Cattle of the Sun God”

“Cattle of the Sun God” is a story taken from Odyssey. It is a very important work written by Homer, and it has provided inspiration for western literature. Odyssey mainly tells the story of the famous Greek hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. He meets a lot of difficulties on the journey and it takes ten years for him to get home. “Cattle of the Sun God” is about one of these difficulties.

Having spent many days on sea, Odysseus decided to stop and rest at a peaceful, sunny island. There were groups of cattle on it. But Odysseus warned his soldiers that whatever happened they should not touch any animal.

However, after eating almost all their food stores, the soldiers, cold, hungry, and miserable, couldn’t resisting going after5 the cattle. So they killed one of the cattle without telling Odysseus. None of them knew these cattle belonged to the Sun God Apollo. When Odysseus knew what was going on, he was upset. He knew it was going to cause trouble, but he didn’t know what bad things would happen.

The Sun God was very angry about what they had done, and decided to punish them. So as soon as they went back to the sea, a dreadful hurricane hit their ship. It destroyed the ship. Things got so bad that Odysseus put two pieces of wood together and took to the water. Ten days later, he was washed up to the shore of another island and was saved. But all of his soldiers were gone.

“太阳神的牧牛”是《奥德赛》里的一个故事。《奥德赛》是荷马的一部重要作品，给予了后来西方文学作品无穷的灵感。它讲的是著名的古希腊英雄奥德修斯在特洛伊沦陷之后的漫长的回家之旅。他在旅途中遭遇了无数艰险，历经十年才回到家中。“太阳神的牧牛”就是其中的一次历险。

在海上漂泊多日之后，奥德修斯决定在一个宁静、阳光充足的小岛上停靠下来休息。岛上有成群的牛，但是奥德修斯警告士兵们无论如何都不要碰那些牛。

但是在他们基本上把所有储存的食物都吃掉之后，又冷又饿的士兵们还是忍不住打起了牛群的主意。他们瞒着奥德修斯杀了一头牛。没人知道这些牛是属于太阳神阿波罗的。当奥德修斯知道这件事之后，他非常恼火，知道他们捅了大娄子，但他并不知道接下来会有怎样的厄运降临。

太阳神勃然大怒，决定惩罚他们。他们一回到海上，一阵可怕的飓风击中了他们的船，把船砸烂了。情况太糟糕了，奥德修斯只能把两片木板拼到一起，在海上漂着。过了十天，他被海浪冲上另一座小岛的海岸，得救了。但他的部下全部遇难身亡。

动动脑

亲爱的读者们，当你们看完这两个关于“Cattle of the Sun God”的小故事之后，是否明白了第一个故事为什么要取这个题目？两篇文章之间又有怎样的联系呢？阅读下面归纳的要点，看看你是否理解正确了。

1. The hero in the story meets some difficulty and he is miserable.

2. There is a solution, which seems way too easy.

3. Afterwards, some trouble will definitely come and the hero gets punished.

单词卡片

1. trickery: 哄骗，花招。

2. fudge: 奶油软糖，奶油或巧克力涂层。

3. mutter: 咕哝，嘀咕。

4. malicious: 恶毒的，恶意的。

5. go after: 试图得到。