Zootopia TT Writing - 1.1 - "The Winter That Never Ended"

"The Winter That Never Ended" - TT Writing - 1.1 Version By PseudoFox

 

[Once upon a time in a place quite far in both distance and time from Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde's Zootopia,]

 

The slow but steady fall of thick snow battered down upon plank after plank of the aged wooden hut. The typical winter weather only made the aura of the early morning even stronger, natural instincts screaming at all manner of creatures to forget anything constructive and just sleep. Even the tiny branches blown about by the wind seemed to prefer to rest in place against the sides of various little farm buildings than keep moving on.

 

Yet the five mammals inside the hut felt nothing but the emotional grip that the moments before a firefight always set loose upon their senses. They clutched their well-worn rifles against their thick jackets as their thoughts and feelings went through a routine, one which each of the partisans knew quite well. A mixture of icy depression and that deep inner heat of hopeful camaraderie flowed through their flesh. Every one of them simply had to look at the other four's stone-like expressions to know that they had little choice.

 

The campaign kept going. They kept moving. They kept attacking before quickly fleeing. They kept surviving.

 

"At least," Matti Holkeri whispered to himself, "we're not over by my cousin's town, out so close to the pole that the night never ends in January."

 

The gopher's lanky figure of slim muscles beneath semi-randomly striped grey fur had lasted only a few weeks up at the northern tip of the country. The experience had scarred him. Waking up to utter darkness before going about his day, switching from eating a breakfast of fried fish and potatoes to chopping wood logs to knitting new hats and more, only to find the blackness still coating the entire landscape at every single moment up to and including bedtime... it felt like an unending nightmare.

 

The life that the 'New Soviet Mammal' promised him and his countrymammals seemed exactly the same. The mere word 'metaphor' didn't cut it. The monstrous entity in charge of the Soviet war machine aimed to spread a curtain of pure darkness across the entire continent, exterminating everything that didn't fit the goal of absolute loyalty to him and him alone. Matti knew that. His four companions in the wooden hut knew that as well.

 

The invaders from the East came to slice their entire nation in two. They'd all grown up in the little fishing villages dotting the numerous lakes and twisting rivers of the constantly frozen countryside. They knew the little gullies surrounded by vast swaths of thick trees more than they could say. Each mammal had spent morning after morning playing in the marshy lands alongside the jagged, rarely paved roads. Three of the five had even pretended to be kings exploring their royal domination, with all manner of fishes and insects alike getting ordered about by those greyish-colored kits. They'd aged into determined foxes.

 

Standing across from those three huddled predators, the massive hare Johan Hjalmar had allowed his eyes to close halfway. His eyes drooped slightly and rested against a loose batch of poorly hammered nails on the wooden planks above his head. He'd entered his own bizarre sort of partly concentrating and partly resting mental zone that mostly served him well, keeping him from needing that much sleep when the infamous Finnish nights began. On the other paw, though, trying too much mental activity while in that mental zone had caused the incident where the hare lit the wrong end of a cigarette and nearly set his entire outfit of warm, tight-fitting clothes ablaze.

 

The nickname of 'Liekki', meaning simply 'Flame', had stuck even after months of fighting together. The hare no longer minded. He had little chance in persuading the close-knit foxes otherwise, anyways.

 

The smallest of the five partisans thought that he had the most to fight for. He had to concede as well that the fact meant that he had the most to lose. It wasn't simply that his family owned the most land. It wasn't either that his happily patriotic family and devoutly religious hated the notion of forcibly renouncing either tradition, especially to an outside occupier. Even the compelling news that he'd recently learned didn't hit him the most.

 

Matti actually stood twice as tall as the average gopher. Of course, that didn't change how both predators and other prey mammals alike constantly dwarfed him. Beyond that, they constantly treated him as a part of the scenery, viewing him as a mere prop in the stage dramas that were their life stories. Before the invasion began, Matti spent day after day getting literally shoved aside and stepped on. Yet he'd prefer that far more than those that pet his little ears and condescendingly found him adorable for trying to participate in the nation's life 'like the rest of us'.

 

Unfortunately, life in his little unit of anti-Soviet partisans proved only somewhat different. He could use his miniaturized pistol and his likewise modified rifle well-enough. That fact, however, only salved a small part of the ever-gaping wound that was his feelings of inadequacy. The hare sped across distances as if his mother had been a motorcycle, and his kick had a force like falling down a flight of stairs. The foxes, for their part, had the ability to spring into ravenous biting attacks when the moment called for it that still made the gopher a bit scared, being on the same side notwithstanding. Matti had his tiny weapons and something back in his hometown village to look forward to. That, he thought, seemed about it.

 

"Matti," the littlest of the foxes suddenly called out.

 

"Yes, Michel?" the gopher asked back. He brushed his soft furred neck against the thin scope of his rifle.

 

"When will you find out if it's a boy or a girl?" The question came with the hint of a smile, quite an oddity for the often solemn predators.

 

"I know already," the gopher replied. He shut his eyes for a moment, taking in a little breath.

 

"Oh?" the largest of the foxes chimed in.

 

"The letter last night, actually," Matti went on, opening his eyes, "made things clear. It's a girl."

 

"Congratulations," the three said in their varying voices, the middle-sized fox oddly featuring the most gruff, guttural sounding voice. Things went beyond hints to outright grins.

 

"It's really," Matti remarked, reflexively patting his right coat pocket with the letter clutched deep inside, "quite a—"

 

A deafening explosion rocked the wooden hut, the force nearly blowing it right over. None of the mammals inside needed to think. They barely even breathed. All five of them shot out of the back entrance and into the mounds of snow. The explosives that the earlier squad of partisans had placed wound up working. The final squad simply needed to finish the job. Across a wide yet short expanse of marshland, their eyes focused on the gravel-covered road besot with various ponds.

 

A gigantic Soviet truck lay in ruins. Its entire front side had gotten transformed into smoldering hunk of misshapen metal— it looked akin to a mound of mashed carrots after Liekki had shoved his fork in. Smoke surged out in multiple directions. Various clumps of brown fur covered by thin yet easily-seen jackets and pants of black cotton, the misapplied outfits being a gift of the Soviet army bureaucracy to their enemies' war effort, stuck out from the many patches of snow. As they'd done several times before, the five mammals of the resistance slowly split up, walking into a circle at the edge of the battle scene.

 

The furry clumps wiggled about. Limbs thrust into the air. Untranslatable screams of raw emotion boomed across the winter air. It only took a matter of seconds for the gopher to see three different bears picking themselves up on his side of the damaged truck, with the predators' limbs clutching their pockets.

 

Matti hoisted his rifle up and fired. A splash of bright crimson rippled across the first of the bears' neck. The big predator let out a low groan before slumping against his comrade beside him. A pair of shots from the other side of the battle scene rang out. Something about the noise caused the second bear to trip on the icy gravel underneath him, the Soviet falling on his back yet again. The third bear fumbled under the first one's dying weight and tried to hold up a thin yet still deadly pistol— the Soviet's face twisted from a contorted daze to a stare of sheer rage.

 

The gopher shifted his body weight and fired again. The pistol flopped right out of the other bear's paw. The predator's arm snapped like a jackknife, redness gushing out around his elbow. Yet he let out a loud roar before twisting with his other arm and shoulder to where the gopher stood.

 

Matti eyed a second pistol. He had only a split-second to react. He held his rifle even closer to his chest and fired a third time.

 

The bullet just missed the bear's shoulder and ricocheted against the jagged side of the truck's torn windshield, likely winding up in one of the snowbank nearby. Blood still poured from the bear's wound. Yet he charged for the gopher all the same, both arms wobbling in the frozen air. The Soviet's pistol blasted off two shots.

 

They both haphazardly whizzed far above the gopher's head. Matti pulled his own rifle's trigger. He heard nothing but the soul-crushing noise of a jam.

 

Matti found himself one quick moment from the bear charging right upon him. The gopher's teeth stuck out as his eyes narrowed into tiny slits. He swung his rifle out like a club. He heard shots getting fired against from the other side of the battle. He kept swinging.

 

"Bastards!" Matti screamed out. He managed to chuck his rifle upwards and knock the second pistol far out of the mauling bear's paw. "You'll never get Suomussalmi!" The bear hurled his entire body upon the little prey mammal. "Burn in hell!"

 

The bear's still bleeding arm clutched the gopher's sides. Matti shoved his rifle over his face and gripped it against the bear's other arm. The big mammal's claws slashed downward. Clumps of the thick fabric shot out all over the place. Though without a scratch, the gopher still let out a weak squeak-like noise of desperation. The bear pressed his body down and opened up his mouth— a disgusting breath filled with raw hate covered the gopher's face.

 

A blur of solid redness blasted out upon Matti's entire body. He hurled his rifle upward and worked to shove the bear off of him. Another crimson blast followed. That one twisted the bear's formerly attacking claw and caused it to limp over his neck. All kinds of whirling sensations filled his mind— it felt hard to even breathe. The bear still lurched down onto the gopher's body.

 

Matti belted out a desperate growl. He punched and kicked straight ahead at full force. The blood-soaked bear slumped a little bit to the side. Matti suddenly himself tugged downward. He shut his eyes and wiggled himself out onto the bare snow. He scampered several inches forward, sucked in a deep breath, and looked up.

 

Michel stood triumphant like a posing statue before Matti, Michel's devious-looking grin covering the fox's face. The larger mammal curled out his paw and pointed. Matti stared out as he saw all sorts of fleshy bits oozing down what used to be the bear's eye and cheek. Somehow still alive, the Soviet made a last, desperate move by waving a beaten-up claw in the air, but it look less than three seconds for him to collapse onto a pile of branches and gravel. Blood poured out to such a degree that a snow-splashed pool began to form.

 

"What... kept you?" Matti murmured, staggering himself upward.

 

He heard Michel let out a deep laugh. The gopher rapidly blinked, trying to use the snow by his legs to brush the excessive blood from his arms and face. The pieces of foreign flesh dotting his own fur nauseated the gopher more than he could ever describe.

 

Matti saw the other two foxes appear beside their companion. They chuckled as well. The gopher stared blankly, still trying to clean off his face.

 

"You're welcome," Michel remarked. He pulled his rifle down and coated its edge with freshly fallen snow. The fox then decliately brushed it across the gopher's back and along his neck. Matti remained silent for a moment, his pained expression still betraying his mixed emotions.

 

"Well, Matti, today has meant at least one thing," began the gruff-voiced fox from the back, "when your daughter is growing up, you can tell her this: you stopped a rampaging bear— a full officer protecting a truck full of supplies no less— using nothing but a jammed gun and your own father's winter coat."

 

"It's... it's ruined, isn't it?" Matti finally reached across his chest and belly. He felt a huge array of claw marks on his thick jacket, blood still sickeningly dripping down. By some miracle, nonetheless, the slashes hadn't penetrated past the final plain t-shirt Matti had worn underneath everything else. "But... well..."

 

"Come on," Liekki said, popping seemingly out of nowhere to pull the gopher forward.

 

The hare turned to prepare a little march. The gopher followed his four companions back to the wooden hut where they'd waited. They all grabbed pairs of skis and got ready for a bit of a journey on them— Liekki hunting for the bag with all of their goggles within in. All of the mammals except for Matti grabbed clumps of fresh ammunition. The gopher froze.

 

"Ah, that so-called 'miniaturized' hunk of shit!" Liekki remarked. He seized the gopher's special rifle and eyed it from inch to offending inch. "The foxes and I, with our Mosin–Nagant? They're things of beauty." The hare held out a paw and stroked along the butt of his own weapon, resting against the wooden hut's walls for a moment. "Such contrast to your monstrosity!"

 

"Yeah," Matti muttered, "I'd rather just stick to my Browning, honestly." He gestured at the slick black metal edge sticking out of his jacket's pocket. Yet he lowered his voice a bit. "Assuming I even have time to draw it when the moment comes, which I didn't."

 

"I'll bet it's simply impossible to clean one of these Mouser rifles properly<" the hare went on. He clutched the gopher's weapon and hoisted it far over both their heads. "See, you can't brush those little nooks that you just have to brush, and there's... yeah." Liekki stopped, sparing the gopher a rant about the state of the arms industry coming into the 1940s.

 

"Here," said a sudden voice. Although looking off in the opposite direction, gopher felt something plopped into his open arms. "We might as well keep it for ourselves. The officer's sure not going to need it where he is right now."

 

"Right," the gopher flatly responded. He gave the weapon a good, long look.

 

Matti hadn't recognized the bear's unusual pistol before, and upon closer inspection he could see exactly why. Almost everything past the safety catch appeared far smaller than usual. It made no sense for a larger mammal. However, the trigger itself coupled with the whole area around its loaded magazine had a sort of compromise size not that different from Matti's Browning. Intriguingly, the metal featured a variety of symbols carved upon them with little Russian letters beside them. All and all, the pistol appeared tailor-made by an expert using a mishmash of parts, possibly aimed for use by a clique of different species.

 

"It's a Tula-Tokarev," Matti declared, letting himself smile for the first time in a while, "one of those special guns given to the so-called 'political officers' even the Soviet's own mammals hate."

 

Matti glanced upwards and saw that the other mammals had already began to ski back out to the battle site. He strapped the pistol to his side and quickly followed them. The partisans didn't have long until they needed to gather the captured supplies. The hare let out a happy noise and jumped around a bit when he realized that they'd captured the best prize of all: the truck had carried stocks and stocks of cooking materials, with even a bunch of tightly-packaged dried foods included.

 

Taking out Soviet field kitchens had done far more to cripple the invaders than even the resistance's senior staff had thought. If the bears couldn't get a reliable meal, then their morale didn't just crater. They got forced to rely more and more on the foreign landscape to get what they could eat, making them even easier pickings for the quickly-moving partisans.

 

"God, I'll bet the markings mean the officer had some kind of heirloom by some communist special group," the gopher remarked, following right beside his compatriots in their breezy skiing, "and we might even be able to tell."

 

He exchanged nods with the hare, both of them twisting about to avoid a sudden batch of trees. A branch knocked against the gopher's side. He spat out a chunk of snow that had gotten whacked up into his mouth.

 

"Just grab the Russian-speaking wolf, yeah," Matti went on, "who lives up in—"

 

A sudden pain shot through the gopher's midriff. He felt his whole body convulse. That couldn't have come at a worse moment. Matti skied straight into a clump of tall rocks.

 

The other mammals immediately stopped and came to the gopher's aid. Matti had fallen into half-consciousness, the gopher's lips quivering as saliva slipped out of his open mouth. The hare let out a torrent of swear words as he delicately cradled his fellow partisan in his arms. Michel immediately clutched a canister of spring water and brought it to Matti's face.

 

It took half a minute of frenetic movement before the other mammals finally located what cause the gopher's still mounting pain. Michel shot out both paws and stripped off nearly all Matti's clothes, leaving the gopher in only his underwear. The fox cried out a genuine prayer when he realized what had happened.

 

The third and final shot upon the still-attacking Soviet officer had somehow buried a severed piece of his claw— complete with a little nub of flesh no less— into the corner of the gopher's thick jacket. With all of the slash marks, blood stains, and constant clumping of the snow, it had been impossible to see earlier. The gopher's adrenaline rush coupled with the particularly kinked way in which the claw had stuck into his chest meant that it barely hurt either.

 

Yet a mindless swat by an offending branch while skiing had abruptly dug the claw in, shoving it right beneath the gopher's fur. The bear's horrible sharpness meant that it had the ability to slide in deep, causing intense pain. The gopher still seemed barely there when Michel delicately slid the claw right out. Disinfectant and bandages quickly followed, the hare being aptly prepared. Still, the gopher's four companions felt overcome.

 

"The bastard's last revenge!" Michel declared. Shivering in barely repressed rage, he finally stamped his paws against the snow beneath him and let out a long, deep growl. "The damned 'political officers'! Those pieces of shit had... had... they'd better be burning in hell right now!"

 

"And to think," Liekki remarked, sighing loudly, "one inch downward and a bit of stupid skiing would've knocked it right off of him altogether! Be just as good as if he was never hit!"

 

"One inch upward, instead," Michel continued, putting a paw on the hare's shoulder, "and it might've gotten slid in entirely. He'd be in a wheelchair in a hospital for the rest of his life."  The fox shut his eyes. "Or worse."

 

"True," Liekki murmured, feeling taken aback. Their small group had never had to bury one of their own before. They all hoped against hope that the invasion would end before the sad time would have to time.

 

"Guys, the hell has happened," Matti moaned, the gopher finally coming to. He shivered. He looked out at the other three mammals with quivering eyes and wandering paws. "Oh, why does it hurt right... like... and we were..."

 

"The officer that tried to maul you," Michel began, "he—"

 

"The bear," Liekki interjected, "he left another-"

 

"Bear, you mean the one that I," Matti started to say. Without even thinking, he shut his eyes tightly. He relieved the entire scene just about twenty minutes earlier. "I... and... we..."

 

"Matti?" asked the two other foxes, previously silent, as they stepped up beside their companions. They looked ready to cradle the gopher between them, all of the paws clutching him as tightly as they could manage. "Will you be okay?"

 

The gopher let out a piercing scream, the loudest that any of the other mammals had ever heard.

 

[Nineteen years later off in another corner of Scandanavia,]

 

"Taatto, I'm begging you," the teenage gopher pleaded, brushing her arms against her smart-looking black miniskirt, "I'm... do you want me to get on my paws and knees? Because I will."

 

"Li Andersson Holkeri, no," declared Matti, thrusting his arms out of his clunky black overcoat. The playing of the full name card showed his seriousness. "Not in public."

 

Li kept her pouting expression on as she stepped away from her father, the older gopher's arms still dangling in the air. Glamorous posters of international movie icons stretched across the red brick wall beside her. She stopped at a set of delicately clean double-doors, the glass glistening in the setting sun's light, and pointed back at her father. Inside the cinema, both gophers could see a group of calm, collected prey families awaiting their drinks and popcorn.

 

"Taatto, do you want to be the last mammal in the whole Western World to see 'Savage Seas', really?" Li asked. She hiked up one of her bushy eyebrows, a trait she'd inherited directly from her mother. "It's a global phenomenon."

 

"I know, my darling." Matti rubbed his paws together, trying to keep his breathing down, as he came to his daughter's side.

 

"You love those Jack Savage novels. You've devoured them, taatto." She shoved one of the doors halfway open. "And you know how much my big brother has praised the movie."

 

"I know." Yet he clung to the same chill spot, the autumn wind blowing little brown leaves through his legs.

 

"And he's stated that, set as it is a whole continent away from here, there's none of a certain species shown within the whole of the movie." Li locked eyes with the older gopher.

 

"I... yes, my darling," Matti remarked. He felt his daughter clutching of his paws in one of her own. He forced a thin smile. "Yes, it's been quite too long before I've set foot in this kind of a place. The immense train stations, the glamorous movie theaters, the grand Christian churches, and everything else..."

 

"They await you, taatto," Li declared. She shoved open both doors before letting out a happy sigh. "Come. Like I said before, I already picked up our two tickets on the way to the library, hours and hours ago."

 

Li left unspoken the fact that both new medication, strange yellow pills associated with blood flow that she didn't understand at all, coupled with a burst talking therapy had made Matti ready to rise above the recluse life. She didn't refer to the stop-then-start-then-stop-again cycle of social connection that her father had struggled with for years after the war. Li felt convinced that she'd won Matti over.

 

For mammals of her father's generation, seeking any kind of assistance to even the most dire problems remained quite taboo. That shade of sickening social traditionalism irritated the thoroughly modern Li as much as the wartime mammals' silly taste in music and even worse taste in fashion. She'd literally drag those that'd listen her into the future if he had to.

 

"I'm not much for popcorn, I'm afraid," Matti commented, "but I'll more than willing to have one of those sweet iced teas."

 

The older gopher's nervous eyes glanced out in all directions. The ornate red walls with smooth tile floors and bright yellow lights appeared welcoming enough. He spotted deer, hares, rabbits, and even the occasional lone fox, the predators outnumbered by the prey at a margin of over ten to one. Everything seemed fine.

 

"Don't forget," Li remarked. Still engrossed in paying for their refreshments, Matti felt a small slip of paper thrust onto his neck. "You'll need this. Seat H10... it's almost like in middle school how you get assigned to your places in this particular cinema, isn't it?"

 

"Yes," Matti muttered. He had a bit of trouble counting out his change. The prices at the cinema— like everywhere else in Sweden every time he visited— seemed to hike up at whatever chance the merchants could grasp. "And, good, here we are."

 

Time went into a blur as he carried his daughter's huge container of popcorn along a skinny corridor. They stepped into a small set of doors and came upon a huge screen just finishing up with some kind of an advertisement. Matti felt himself truly zone out and relax in public for the longest time. The film hadn't even begun yet. Truly, he needed to listen to his daughter more often.

 

Twenty minutes of the movie went by like a shot. Matti found irresistible the charismatic rabbit with his combination of handsome black stripes and hidden physical strength beneath his tuxedo. Jack Savage reminded him immediately of the best of the best that the anti-Soviet agents that various nations had set forth, and somehow that fact only triggered good memories. After rapidly kicking his way through a group of wolves out of a capsizing boat, however, Savage's adventures suddenly lost Matti's attention.

 

"My apologies, my darling," Matti murmured, sliding himself out of his seat, "but I made a grave mistake getting that size of an iced tea." He didn't add the gigantic casserole that he'd eaten only a few hours before, which churned his insides more than he had anticipated.

 

Li let out a short, simple laugh. Matti smiled. He wished he could take all sorts of things that came up in life with her beautiful sense of humor and proportion.

 

After stepping out of the particular area screening 'Savage Seas', Matti sucked in a deep breath. He couldn't see the restrooms anywhere. Ambling about the corridor for a moment, however, he spotted a sign off in the distance that appeared promising. He made his way over and popped through the doors. Blissfully bereft of other mammals, the clean space appeared like something out of a kitchen catalog for a department store.

 

"Ah, thank goodness," Matti remarked. It only took him a matter of seconds to pop into a stall. "If only every business could look this nice— God bless us!"

 

The sounds of ambling and rustling, somebody else of great size entering the restrooms, didn't come to the gopher's attention one bit. He stepped out of the stall and carefully began washing his paws. Matti pressed his lips together and began whistling a simple tune.

 

The long, dramatic creak open of another stall's doors stopped Matti's mental concert in its tracks. The gopher's eyes opened as wide as dinner plates. A massive clump of brown fur complete with tight-fitting black jacket and immensely sharp white claws stepped over to the gopher's side.

 

Matti couldn't move. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't even think.

 

The gopher's chest area began crying out in a dull but growing pain. He felt some control over his limbs again, tingling sensations shooting out from the bottom of his legs. Yet he didn't budge.

 

"What's the problem?" the bear groaned out in a gruff, dark-sounding voice. It appeared to rise from the center of the earth. "Little one?"

 

The bear's raised arm went for a container of soap beside the gopher's position. At the same time, though, Matti wasn't anywhere near able to think of things like that. All he saw was the immense creature lifting up its arm and pointing its claw-covered paws directly at his head.

 

"God!" Matti screamed out, all of the color draining from his face.

 

The bear, feeling a burst of confusion, froze in place. That gave the gopher the ability to twist his body over and thrust his legs against the floor. Gathering a bit of speed, he burst out of the bathrooms and into the nearby corridor. Turning himself, though, presented a challenge that his flesh didn't meet.

 

The gopher launched himself, to his horror, directly upon the huge trash can beside the restrooms' door. He shut his eyes tightly. Empty cups of soda, soiled napkins, half-eaten clumps of candy, and more rained down upon him, sticking tightly to his fur. His legs wiggled about upon the wall as the edge of the trash can pinned down one of his arms.

 

After a few seconds of merely lying in place, his brain feeling wiped of rational thought, Matti cried out with a set of embarassing squeaks. Eyes opening back up, he spied a fat deer from the far edge of the corridor running over. He opened his mouth a bit only for a crumbled paper bag to fall into it. The gopher wished that he could've been anywhere else than right there at that exact moment. One fact, though, seemed the worst out of everything else.

 

That horrid sensation in the middle of his chest... it still hurt.

 

[Over five decades later, in a Zootopia changed forever by the actions of Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde,]

 

"My great-grandfather made it a life's cause to never see another bear after the Winter War," Gail Kalevi-Holkeri Bailey declared. The emotional-looking gopher sat down upon the table and leaned forward, putting his paws into his lap. "Yes, he fought even more Soviets following the incident that nearly crippled him. Of course, he did. He had to. His sort of hit-and-run tactics proved decisive and ultimately the invading powers gave up in their efforts to take over the country."

 

"And they did win, by a huge margin," chimed in Gail's fox friend, sitting on a concrete block behind the gopher.

 

"They called him the 'goodnight gopher'," Gail continued, cocking his head to the side as he kept reading from his little green book of notes, "because of how he got himself into tight spaces and then fired from his captured Soviet pistol. He took out a large number of bears before the war ended, acting like a sniper without a sniper's rifle."

 

"The war ended, but it kind of didn't end at the same time," the fox added.

 

"Matti's January 1940 seemed to last his whole life," Gail concluded. He awkwardly coughed, finding himself confused by his own notes. "What I'm trying to say with the 'Jack Savage' story is... well... his fears and phobias changed. For the rest of his life, all throughout peacetime until his death of brain cancer in the late 1970s... like..." Gail trailed off. He finally realized that he had no idea how to properly end his story, and he'd already worked himself up so that his insides felt filled with this fizzy emotional froth.

 

The Zootopian Genealogy Society featured a wide range of mammals varying in age range, political belief, specific species, social class, and more. They welcomed all manner of stories and enthusiastically greeted prospective members, holding a large number of public meetings. At the same time, though, discussing what one had learned after a bit of research often proved uncomfortable to listeners and speakers alike.

 

Gail mentally kicked himself for not realizing that the group's meeting at that particular public library had about a fifth of the crowd made up of bears. It hadn't even occurred to him to consider the fact. He'd simply stood up and started talking when he got called on.

 

"Oh, so like," a teenage wolf with a name-tag that Gail couldn't read began, the predator idly wiggling his paws against his plain white deck chair, "it's a phobia? That kind of makes sense. It's like those mammals who're super scared of spiders. My little sister is so totally like that, my God."

 

"I mean," Gail interjected, but he didn't feel sure at all what to say, "it got even more serious than that."

 

"My sister won't even go to WoolMart's, you know? The big ones," the teenager continued, getting more animated, "have those 'pet sections', right? She totally hates the idea of even being close to where spiders are held, off in their little crate-like things! She sees even a CD cover, a magazine, a newspaper, or whatever the hell else with a picture of a spider on it? She flips! She's so afraid!"

 

"With my great-grandfather," the gopher finally said, figuring out a delicate way to put things, "he decided to turn things into this really basic prejudice. It went beyond something like never seeing a play with bears in it, even as 'the bad guys'. He wouldn't go to any public space where it appeared likely a bear would come in. Even riding in a private car on a highway seemed tough, with spying somebody off in another lane triggering another reaction."

 

"Reaction?" asked an gentle-looking elderly hare sitting off to Gail's side. He couldn't make out her name-tag either. "Oh, that PTSD, it's so serious. God bless anyone who's suffered from it."

 

"Exactly, ma'am," Gail said, "it all came from his deep seated physical feelings. Matti simply couldn't actually see one of that species without getting the sensation of being attacked yet again. His chest would get pained. His face would get this twitching because it seemed like it got covered with blood and guts one more time. It... yeah, it was awful. In conclusion, he became a half-recluse. He only stopped being a full one because of my grandmother."

 

That appeared as good a point to truly finish as any. Gail slipped off of the table, carefully collecting his notebook and sliding it into a pocket, and went for the meeting's table of refreshments. A bunch of murmurs thanking Gail for sharing his genealogy story sounded off. The gopher couldn't make any of them out properly, but he still nodded as he sipped some more lemon-lime soda.

 

"So, what you're saying is," an oddly short and extremely fat antelope started to say. All across the room, a few groans began. The antelope apparently had some kind of a reputation that neither Gail nor his friend knew anything about.

 

"Yes, sir?" Gail asked, finishing with his can of soda.

 

"You're saying that your great-grandfather couldn't BEAR to see one of them?"

 

The fox and gopher both threw their soda cans at him.

 

[The End]