Once upon a time, there was a tiger whose stripes went the wrong way. Poor Tomaso. His stripes were horizontal! It was very tiresome for him to stand on his head to try to fit in with the other young tigers at school. One day he decided to venture into the world and find another animal with horizontal stripes. He put all his belongings, along with a light carnivorous snack, into a backpack. (Tiger backpacks look like what people would call saddlebags.) Then he hit the road.

He trotted for a long time, until he did not see any tigers, buildings, trees, or birds he knew. Eventually, far from town, he found himself on the a street bigger than any he’d ever seen before. It was a highway. He did not know what dangerous places highways were. He bared his teeth and gums and let out a small roar—as he did in town to let a driver know that he wanted to cross the street. But the cars paid him no notice. So he trotted along the side of the road. Some of the oncoming cars’ automated lane-crossing detectors mistook his horizontal stripes for lane dividers. One car—whose driver had particularly slow reflexes—nearly hit him—and then, at the last second, swerved and crashed into a tree.

Tomaso dashed up and wrested open the driver-side door. Slowly there emerged from the driver’s seat a kind of regularly patterned dome, and under it a creature that an animal in the know would refer to as a tortoise. Thanks to his shell, the tortoise was unhurt. Thanks to his slow reflexes, he had not yet realized he was involved in a crash. He looked dazed, and as if his hair would be standing on end, if he’d had any.

    Slowly, as he waited for the tortoise to gather himself, Tomaso’s animal instincts began to surface. The tortoise began in a certain light to look appetizing. (Tomaso had finished his light carnivorous snack within five minutes of setting out from home.) He began to lick his chops.

Unconsciously, he crouched. He was about to pounce and shred his prey when the tortoise suddenly realized at last that there had been a terrible accident and popped into his shell. Tomaso sprang—and banged his nose.
    “I suppose it serves me right,” Tomaso said. “And I’m allergic to shellfish anyway.”
    A deep voice emanated from the shell. “Excuse me.”
    “Who is that?”
    “It’s me?”
    “You mean…”
    “Yes, me. I want to tell you,” the deep voice slowly articulated, “I want to tell you that I’m not a fish.”
    “Then what are you?”
    “Well,” the voice continued, the round tip of the tortoise’s head tentatively emerging from the shell. “Professionally, I’m an express courier. As for my lineage, I come from a long line of tortoises.”
    “How did an animal—an animal like you…” Tomaso was tempted to say ‘slowpoke,’ but didn’t want to be rude, “an animal who has to go slowly because he’s carrying around a big dome—get into the express courier business?”
    “Well,” said the tortoise, his head protruding slightly further, so that his eye now appeared and his voice lost some of its inner-shell resonance. “I am the fastest one in my family.”
    “If you’re the fastest, then who’s the slowest? I mean—“ Tomaso tried to temper this unintended criticism. “I mean, are your whole family tortoises?”
    The tortoise reflected. He spent a good deal of time—several minutes—trying to scratch his head. His front legs, though, were too short. Tomaso grew impatient, but whenever he was about to interrupt the tortoise’s meditation, the tortoise emitted a kind of grunt indicating that he was still thinking.
    At last, he spoke.
    “Yes,” he said. Then he snapped his mouth shut and stretching his neck gave Tomaso a kind of leer.
    Tomaso worried that he’d given offense. “Maybe you’re a descendent of THE tortoise, the famous one who raced the hare?”
    “Ah,” said the tortoise. He turned his head, displaying his profile to the tiger. “Perhaps you recognized an air of distinction in my features? Some resemblance to my illustrious ancestor? Many animals have remarked on the similarity since my great forbear appeared in a rather high grossing Disney production.”
    “To be honest,” said Tomaso, “I thought that was a turtle.”
    “Heavens, no!” said the tortoise, pitying the tiger’s ignorance more than he bristled at the astonishing mistake. “Turtle? He was not a turtle. He was a tortoise. I am a tortoise. A thoroughbred. Thus my—relative—speed.”
Tomaso couldn’t help himself. He wanted to be polite, but he was getting hungry. He tried not to think about it, but blurted out the question stuck in his mind. “Do they serve tortoise soup in restaurants or only turtle?”
    “Well, I…” The tortoise prepared to make another ponderous utterance, but then broke off. A Volkswagon Rabbit shot past on the highway. “Oh dear, I’ve been overtaken by our competitor.” He looked forlornly at his damaged Volkswagon Beetle. The tiger noticed that the car and driver had remarkable similar shapes. “Really, this is much more serious than a mere matter of bouillon and your stomach. I have a small radioactive parcel that really needs to be delivered quickly.”
    “Radioactive? Who do you work for? Tomaso was flustered. “And don’t you realize that I’m a carnivore?” He bared his teeth the way he did at crosswalks.
    “Once you’ve saved three reactors on the brink of meltdown—thanks to a quick mind and agile limb—a miniature cat simply doesn’t inspire the same sort of fear.” The tortoise looked again at his car. “I suppose it might start again if I kick it. It’s worked before.” He crawled up to the side and performed an act which, in a video sped up to four times normal speed, might resemble a kick. Then he crawled into the car and turned the key. To Tomaso’s amazement, the engine started!
    “You’re going west, aren’t you, my young friend? Hop in.”
    Tomaso looked up and down the forbidding highway. Then he shrugged and climbed into the passenger seat.

“So, Mr. Tortoise, where are we going? Wherever it is, are there other animals there that look like me?”
    “Hmm…” He looked Tomaso up and down, inadvertently leaning forward and accelerating as he did so. “They say there are others near the nuclear reactor who look a bit peculiar.”
    “They have horizontal stripes?”
    “Nothing that peculiar, I’m afraid.”
    “Can you drop me off at the zoo?”
    The tortoise looked horrified. “Why would you want to go there?”
    “There are gazelle there. And free food. And iron bars to protect against human beings. It’s paradise! Tigers there are diplomats. They represent our species to the rest of the world. If I go, everyone will see that some tigers are a quarter-turn different from other tigers. I’ve always wanted to be a diplomat.”
    The tortoise shook his head. “My poor boy, you’ve not spent much time in the civvvilized” – the tortoise lingered for a very long time on the letter ‘v’ – “the civvvilized world, have you? You’ve come straight from some small town in the countryside, haven’t you?”
    Tomaso hung his head in shame.
    “Cheer up. There is no need to feel shame. If you want excellent gazelle, might I suggest we instead stop in at the gaz station?”
    “You mean the gaS station?”
    “No, the gaz station—you can fill up on gazelline at the pump. Much more civilized, wouldn’t you say?”
    “I think you’re making fun of me.”
    The tortoise chuckled. To be precise, he produced a noise that those lacking extensive experience with tortoises might easily mistake for choking. That is exactly what Tomaso did. He reached over and slapped the tortoise on the back—the shell that is. The first slap made the car horn sound. The second caused the tortoise to lean forward again on the accelerator. They were now traveling at 110 mph.
    “Oh,” said the tortoise, stretching his neck so that it could see above the dashboard for what appeared to be the first time. “This is quite thrilling.”
    “Aren’t we going a little fast?”
    Turning to Tomaso, the tortoise said, “Now that you’re out in the world…”
    “But I’ve always been in the world.”
    “The wwwide world,” the tortoise continued.
    “Oh, the wide world,” Tomaso said, nodding.
    “The wide world, as I said, you need proper equipment.”
    “Like what?” Tomaso asked. He looked himself up and down. All he had were his sadly ill-oriented stripes and his backpack. How little he knew about the wide world!
    “A mobile phone,” the tortoise said, “to begin with.” The phrase “to begin with” presaged several minutes of instruction. Tomaso braced himself for a slow passage of words and a fast passage of asphalt. He paid careful heed to the tortoise.
    “And then, I’d recommend a good backpack. Not the mule apparatus you have.”
    “A good backpack,” Tomaso repeated, trying hard to fix the tortoise’s advice in his memory.
    “And good shoes.”
    “And good shoes.”
    “And… but wait,” the tortoise braked, screeching to a halt. As smoke billowed up from the tires, he uttered with uncanny speed. “Are you licensed?”
    “Licensed?” Tomaso asked timidly.
    “Licensed!”
    “I don’t think so. To drive, you mean?”
    “No. Are you a licensed tiger?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Oh dear. If you don’t know,” said the tortoise ponderously and decisively, “then you’re not.”
    “Oh,” said Tomaso. The wide world was bewildering indeed.
    The tortoise again accelerated.
    “I’m sorry,” said Tomaso. “Is it a problem?”
    “My dear boy…” The tortoise shook his head. “It’s the worst possible problem.”
    “But why?”
    “I had a friend,” the tortoise said, abruptly weaving around a tractor-trailer in front of them. “A good friend. He was crawling around the city, minding his own business, as I might do. Crawling around, I say, when suddenly…”
    “Suddenly,” Tomaso repeated anxiously.
    “Suddenly, a police officer stopped him and asked if he was licensed.”
    “And then what happened?”
    “I got the call, you see. I sometimes do legal work for the WWF, so my friends often ask me for help. I hurried over as fast as I could.”
    “Were you driving or crawling?” Tomaso asked.
    “…crawled as fast as I could,” the tortoise continued. “But I was too late. Two days had passed. A mere forty-eight hours. Some hundreds of minutes, I reckon. I don’t know all that happened. All I know is that my friend, my dear friend was ultimately on the menu of a Chinese restaurant. It was terrible. There, I think I’ve answered your question about soup.”
    “Oh my. That’s awful,” Tomaso said sympathetically. “But no one eats tigers.”
    “True,” said the tortoise. “True, but with your stripes, you’re prime circus material. Prime, I say.”
    “The circus? That sounds like fun.”
    “My dear boy…” The tortoise again shook his head and raced past a small turquoise Acura.
    They drove into the city. The tortoise had to caution Tomaso not to poke his head out of the window. The massive buildings, the crowds of people, the many dogs—thankfully restrained on cords—were all quite new and dizzying to him. They stopped in front of a marble building, the most imposing one Tomaso had seen. After emerging from the car, the tortoise stopped at the base of the imposing staircase. He looked this way and that, this way and that, as if in the throes of a vigorous decision.
    “Is there a problem?” Tomaso asked.
    “No problem,” the tortoise said.
    “Are we going up?”
    “Certainly,” said the tortoise.
    “Shall we – shall we start going up?”
    “Indeed. I’m trying to decide whether to take the stairs or the ramp. The ramp will be more rapid, naturally, but the stairs are—well, more dignified, as befits a thoroughbred. And they’ll keep me trim,” he added, as he mounted the lowest step.
    The tortoise, though, was wider than the steps of the staircase were long. As a result, when he had managed to haul himself up a step, he tended to teeter. As often as not he would tumble down several steps before he realized what had happened and could stop his fall. This process of triumphant scaling and less than dignified tumbling occupied two hours, during which Tomaso had plenty of time to take in his surroundings and even steal eight hotdogs for lunch. (He did not know, of course, that he was stealing. He was merely adapting his predatory instincts to a new setting.)
At last, the tortoise reached his tantalizing goal, the top of the staircase.
    “I’m in better shape than I thought. I’m not in the least out of breath,” he said.
    “That was rather slow,” said Tomaso.
    “The wheels of justice are even slower,” said the tortoise.
    “You didn’t say anything about wheels,” said Tomaso. “Do we have to drive again?”
    “No. I mean The System. And sometimes they hound you. They’ll probably just badger you. But don’t worry, my friend, I think we’ll get you your license. I have some legal experience, you know. No friend of mine will land in the stew this time,” he said, looking sidelong at Tomaso.
    Down a long corridor that made strange noises (Tomaso had never heard a real echo before), down a shorter one, and again down a longer, but narrower and dirtier one, they traversed a marble maze. They stopped in front of a door with a frosted glass window, on which were printed the words, “Office of Animal Licenses.”
    “Here we are,” said the tortoise.
Tomaso looked up. The doorknob was terribly high. He didn’t see how he would reach it.
    “Can you reach the doorknob?” he asked.
    The tortoise, however, simply pushed through a flap at the bottom of the door.
    “They’re very accommodating here,” he replied. “In some things, at least.”
They entered a small vestibule in which they were confronted by another two doors. On the left were printed the words “Two legs.” On the right, “Four legs.” The tortoise pushed through the flap on the right. “The other door is for birds mostly, although I’ve seen a pair of swans together mistakenly take the right.”
    Behind the door was a large steel desk. Behind the desk sat an immense, dark, furry animal wearing trifocals. It was a badger.
    “Good afternoon,” said the badger-clerk. “May I help you?”
    “Indeed,” said the tortoise. “I daresay you can. My friend here needs a license.”
    “Certainly. You are aware of the five-dollar fee?”
    Tomaso looked anxiously at the tortoise. “Yes,” said the tortoise. “I’ll pay for you,” he said to Tomaso. “You don’t have any money, do you?” Tomaso shook his head.
    “Very good. What type of license is the applicant seeking?” The badger opened a tome lying in front of him.
    “I need a tiger license,” said Tomaso.
    “A tiger license. It’s not five dollars, then,” said the badger. “I’ll have to look it up. Yes, here it is. It’s six-fifty. Now, let us see.” He looked at the page before him. Then he removed his glasses and scrutinized Tomaso. Then he looked down at the book again.
    “No.”
    “No?”
    “No. It won’t do.”
    “Won’t do?” Tomaso repeated plaintively.
    “Officially sanctioned tigers have vertical stripes,” the badger said, thumping the book with his paw. “It is clear in the diagram here. Look.” He held the book up. Tomaso and the tortoise saw a line drawing of a tiger with vertical stripes. Vertical arrows beside the stripes emphasized the correct orientation. “The applicant, as is patently clear to this representative of the local government, possesses stripes aligned in a singularly and indisputably horizontal manner. It won’t do.”
    “But I am a tiger. Look,” said Tomaso, standing on his front paws. “My stripes are vertical.”
    “Take care,” admonished the badger, demonstratively extending his paw.     “Defrauding a government official, young applicant, is a criminal offense.”
    “My friend really does need a license,” interjected the tortoise. “Now I do not want to have to call in my colleagues at the WWF…”
The badger shook his head. “I’m sorry. I cannot furnish your companion with a tiger license. It simply won’t do. But…”
    “But?” repeated Tomaso.
    “But… I understand that a license is important to you. The System aims to be lenient, flexible. I believe that—now let me confirm this.” He quickly leafed through his book. “Yes, given the set of acceptable characteristics, I believe I am in a position to offer you a license.” He held up the book again to a page showing a fish with horizontal stripes. It bore the heading     “Zebrafish.”
    “But I’m a tiger,” Tomaso protested. “I’m not a fish. Not even a little.”
    The badger tilted his glasses. “And it’s only three dollars and fifty cents. There’s also a school discount for fish licenses.”
    Tomaso turned to the tortoise. It was his money, after all. The tortoise began to raise his head. The badger waited. Tomaso waited. The result was an indignant, long-necked stare. Then the tortoise spoke. “Certainly not.” He turned to Tomaso. “I have a friend…”
    “The one who ended up… who landed in hot water?”
    “No, a different friend. He too was a tortoise. A tortoise—I was going to say like you or me, but you are at best only a tortoise in sympathy. This tortoise, perhaps not a thoroughbred, but very much a tortoise all the same, was also badgered by the officials here. He could only obtain a turtle license. The demands were too much for him. He was not of a naturally amphibious character. With such a license, he felt at sea.”
    “What happened?”
    “He did his obligatory water service under the terms of…” The tortoise stopped.
    Tomaso and the badger-clerk waited. For a full five minutes, the tortoise remained silent and unmoving. Finally, the badger-clerk turned to Tomaso.   “Has your friend had a stroke?”
    “…the license,” continued the tortoise. “And he was marooned.”
    “Marooned? On a desert island, you mean?” Tomaso asked.
    “No. No, He flew to Aruba to do his service. He went scuba diving. But he ran out of money and was stranded there. Stranded there for years. It’s a very expensive place, and employment is scarce. He had to take odd jobs. He posed in photos with tourists. Tourists, the worst subspecies of human. He worked for the police acting as a boot for impounded vehicles, wedging himself behind the rear wheel. He rented his back to crack coconuts. He was sold as a locally sourced paperweight and would then crawl back to the shop for resale. And many other jobs I don’t remember. But he simply couldn’t make ends meet.
    Ultimately, he had to sell his shell to an optician to pay his passage back home. You can’t imagine the sadness and humiliation, young tiger. He was shell-shocked. You find your stripes embarrassing, but they’re entirely correctable in Photoshop, and at least you still have stripes.
    A zebrafish license might save you three dollars, but at what cost, my friend? At what cost?”
    Three dollars was more than Tomaso had ever saved in his life. But he understood that if not his soul, at least the essence of his tigerhood was at stake. A zebrafish was a meal, not a suitable professional credential for a young carnivore hoping to rise in the world.
    “Mr. Badger…” Tomaso rose again on his hind paws. He extended his front paws in a gesture that enjoined silence. The badger stared at him over his glasses. The tiger’s impending declaration seemed to call for lenses more powerful than the mere three available in his trifocals.
    “Mr. Badger, I cannot do it. I cannot betray my tiger nature.”
The badger removed his glasses and passed a paw over his brow. “I am to understand that you refuse my offer?”
    “I can’t take the license.”
    “You refuse definitively?”
    “Yes.”
    “Very well, but do you mean you will present yourself publicly in a completely and entirely unlicensed state? Are you of sound mind—compos mens—and body? Do you fully understand the implications of your decision?”
    Tomaso looked at the tortoise.
    “He understands. He understands that the law is unyielding in its exigencies,” said the tortoise gravely.
    They left the badger’s office, each passing in turn through the four-legged-animal flap. The tortoise’s slow, dignified motion added solemnity to their retreat.
    “You acted nobly, my friend,” the tortoise said quietly. “This is a desperate situation. It is time to contact The Underground.”

Tomaso followed the tortoise along another marble corridor, even darker, emptier, and longer than the first. Then another corridor. And another.
    It seemed to Tomaso, as they travelled further and further into the recesses of the building and his claws clicked endlessly on marble floors, that they had covered far more ground than a single city block could possibly contain. It also seemed as though they were traveling not just in space, but also back in time. In these seldom used halls, the black lettering on the glass panels of the office doors was old and flaking. Tomaso could just barely make out “Office of Rural Electrification,” “Municipal Smallpox Survey,” and “International Equine Brotherhood of Carriage Workers.”
Hours, perhaps days, passed—Tomaso couldn’t tell. Glass panels gave way to carved wooden signs swinging from intricately worked iron armatures above solid, heavily wrought wooden doors. The signs, perhaps once brightly painted with letters and animals, foodstuffs, stars, and gods, were faded and forlorn. “The King’s Bakerie,” read one, with a painted loaf of bread, now looking like a large, flat grub. Lettered in patchy metallic gold against a black background, “Ye Olde Starre Inne.” Another sign read “Bibliopolium.” A carved stack of books, tinted in pinks and pale blues, bore the memory of once gaudy colors.
    The marble floor eventually gave way to cobblestones, barely visible in the gaslight—no, those were torches burning, Tomaso realized. And then they were walking on dirt. Tomaso could not find the source of the faint illumination that guided them, until he noticed that the tortoise, walking behind him, had a kind of miner’s light strapped to his head.
    “This part of City Hall isn’t used much,” the tortoise explained. “The elevator is broken. Or…” He stopped and gazed slowly into the distance. “Or the elevator operator died. I don’t remember which happened first. I was young then. We can go can see the bones, if you like.” Tomaso shook his head. “And the WiFi is spotty down here,” the tortoise said. “Now where is it? We need to count. It’s the forty-seventh, if memory serves. But you mustn’t tell anyone. No one at all, young tiger. You must be prudent, despite your lack of the many years of wisdom I have painstakingly accumulated.”
    “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
    Here the wall was built from rubble. More or less evenly spaced along its base was a series of roughly dug holes. As the tortoise again began to crawl, a whistle pierced the darkness. Then came the sounds of distant scrabbling and thumping.
    “I had a white flag somewhere. Oh, yes.” He withdrew into his shell. A few minutes later, he reemerged with a white flag somehow held in his right—appendage. (Tomaso didn’t know what to call a tortoise’s front paw, and neither do I.) “Best to avoid misunderstandings.”
    The tortoise counted the holes out loud, Tomaso repeating after him, “One, two, three…” Each hole had a metal sign affixed to the wall above it. The signs were crisply lettered, and appeared to be new. “BEWARE: LAIR OF ANGRY FOXES,” Tomaso read. Then “SEVERED PAWS NOT RETURNED,” and “WOLVERINES STACKED THREE DEEP.”
    When they reached forty-seven, the tortoise stopped. The sign above Hole #47 simply said, “GO AWAY.”
    “Here we are,” said the tortoise. “It’s The Underground,” he whispered. He waved the white flag, extinguished his lamp, and went in. Tomaso followed.

Shadows rushed past them in the darkness, leaving cold drafts in their wake. Tomaso heard strange, faint, mechanical sounds, almost like a kind of gnawing. The floor was cold dirt. The air was moist.
    “Could you turn on your light back on, Mr. Tortoise?” Tomaso asked.
    “No,” replied the tortoise. “Not here. Just stick with me.” Tomaso gently bit the tortoise’s tail and followed.
    A voice challenged them in the darkness.
    “Qui vive!?”
    The tortoise whispered a passphrase. Tomaso heard only the words “Holy Hopping.” They were permitted to pass. The mechanical sounds grew louder.
    “Here you’ll need to squeeze a bit. You’ll be happy you didn’t eat me after all,” the tortoise remarked, making his chuckling noise that sounded like strangulation.
    And he was right. Tomaso squeezed hard to make his way through a small dirt hole. The tortoise took off his shell and followed.
    Tomaso emerged unexpectedly into a brightly lit, tidy office filled with rows of desks and with a large military map on the wall. He now saw the source of the mechanical sounds. The desks were occupied by rabbits. One was mechanically gnawing open envelopes, another was shredding documents using a similar procedure, and others pursued various creative and destructive clerical tasks, mostly involving either gnawing or electric typewriters. Sitting on top of a desk at the center of the room was a small, spherical, exceedingly appetizing (in Tomaso’s view) brown rabbit with droopy ears and a strange half-crescent on his forehead.
    “Hello, tiger and tortoise,” said this small rabbit. “Welcome. Welcome!”
    The tortoise craned his neck up at the desk. “Who… are… you?”
    “My name is Bilberry. I’m filling in today for Commander Cherry.”
    Commander “Bing” Cherry was the leader of The Underground and a legend among animals. Greatly feared in the upper floors of the building, he had been pursued many times—by the police, the FBI, the National Guard, the U.S. Army, and Animal Control. But whenever encircled by his heavily armed foes, he—bing! (thus his nom de guerre)—disappeared with a hop into a bush, down a manhole, or into a U.N. General Assembly. He not only eluded his predators, but frequently also managed to inflict gnawing damage on their equipment. He was, as I said, a legend. The small rabbit on the desk before them was clearly not a fully adequate substitute.
    “I see. Is the Commander on campaign? Or is he injured?” the tortoise asked with obvious concern, suggesting that he knew the Commander personally.
    “He just sprained an ear,” said the small rabbit, adding proudly, “I’m his brother.”
    “I’m glad it’s not serious,” the tortoise said. “Well, we must make do. We need your assistance, exceedingly small rabbit. My friend here…” He gestured at Tomaso, who stood up on his hind paws to orient his stripes respectably “…is in need of a license. Those badger-clerks upstairs are refusing him a proper license because—please return to all paws, young tiger—his stripes are a bit singular. Nonconforming. He’ll be a pariah if we can’t help. Or he will need to impersonate a fish for the rest of his life.”
    “Why a fish?”
    “They offered him only a zebrafish license.”
    “Is that bad? One of my close friends is a sturgeon.”
    “But my friend here is a tiger. He can’t be a fish. It would ruin his career. The badger-clerks cannot be permitted to do this. They must be… must be… STOPPED!” the tortoise bellowed, astonishing Tomaso.
    “You don’t want me to blow anything up, do you?” Bilberry asked. The office went silent as the other rabbits stopped working and eagerly swiveled their chairs around to listen. “I can’t do that. Only Bing—excuse me, Commander Cherry—is allowed to.” With obvious disappointment, the rabbit clerks swiveled back and resumed their work.
    “Yes, I know. They say the cherry bomb was named after him. I am indeed quite dissatisfied. Quite. But we’re only asking for a tiger license.”
    “I don’t think that will help. If your friend is caught, they could look up his license type and then… it wouldn’t be good, Mr. Tortoise.”
    “Yes. I hadn’t considered that.”
    Bilberry turned to Tomaso, who had been writhing uncomfortably during their conversation. “You could join us here at The Underground, Mr. Tiger,” Bilberry said. “But I think you might be unhappy. You look like the open air type. I can see that you’re very nice, and I personally get along well all with the cats I meet. But you’d make some of the newer staff anxious. Especially when you stand on your hind paws.”
Tomaso nodded sadly.
    “I have an idea, though. Do you like to travel?”
    “I love to travel,” replied Tomaso. “But I don’t have the right equipment yet. I need to get good shoes. And a proper backpack. And a mobile phone…”
    “Please wait a minute, Mr. Tiger,” Bilberry said. He hopped off the desk and went to confer with a sagacious-looking rabbit at another desk. She in turn conferred with a massive tome of law. She leafed through it with obvious dissatisfaction, making Tomaso more and more nervous. He did not realize that what upset her was not the contents of the book, but how much of it had been gnawed through by other rabbits in the office. Some of them had lunched on whole statutes. Having found what she was looking for, she read for a few minutes and said something to Bilberry, who then hopped back up onto the desk.
    “Would you like to be a diplomat?” he asked Tomaso.
    “A diplomat?” Tomaso said, unconsciously rising in excitement onto his hind paws. “But I’ve always wanted to be a diplomat. I’d love to be a diplomat. That’s exactly what I want to be.”
    “Oh good,” said Bilberry. “We’re going to send you to another country. You see, if you go with a diplomatic passport, they can’t touch you. Even if you’re domestically unlicensed. That’s according to my sister Chartreuse. She’s a lawyer.”
    “But what’s a diplomatic passport? It sounds even harder to get than a license.”
    “Brilliant!” exclaimed the tortoise, who was just now catching up with the conversation. “A diplomat. Now why didn’t I think of that? Preoccupied. Preoccupied with those fuel rods. Really must get them delivered, come to think of it… really must.”
    “We can make a passport for you, Mr. Tiger. We make all kinds of documents here for animals in need. Then we’ll mail you out of the country in a big box. Don’t worry, it’ll be comfortable. I do it all the time. You just have to remember to chew on some ginger. And I’d recommend against roaring while in transit.”
    “But where will I go?”
    “That’s easy,” said Bilberry. “We’ll send you to London. I have all kinds of cat friends there. They’ll take care of you. And the Queen just loves animals.”
    “And if you’re lucky, she’ll knight you!” said another rabbit, swiveling around from a desk. “So remember to bring your best sweater.”

The rabbit clerks gathered around a few hours later for Tomaso’s sendoff, celebrating with a hastily assembled (and repugnant) vegan tiger cake set on Bilberry’s desk beside a beautifully forged diplomatic passport. The rabbits conversed cheerfully, gnawed cake, and teased their coworkers by shoving them in front of Tomaso and causing them to scamper away in fear. Tomaso paid little attention, as he excitedly quizzed Bilberry on how to conduct himself once he reached his new home. There were so very many things to learn about the wide world, including what seemed like an endless list of diplomatic protocols that Chartreuse had to keep consulting half-gnawed books about. “Baron, Viscount, Earl, Marquess, Duke,” Tomaso repeated to himself, “Baron, Viscount, Marquess…”.
    In the midst of the merriment and excitement, the tortoise seemed morose. When the time came to escort Tomaso to the Priority Mail International box that was to convey him across the Atlantic, he gravely addressed his tiger friend.
    “Farewell, young tiger. Our acquaintance has been brief, a scintilla of time in the life of a tortoise. But your plight, bravery, and strangely patterned fur have left a lasting impression with me, one that I shall never forget.” He extended his front leg. “May the stars in the great tortoise dome of the sky look favorably upon you.” He and Tomaso shook appendages. Tomaso then took up position in his box.
    “Farewell!” Tomaso called out. “Thank you, Bilberry, Chartreuse, and my many, many rabbit-clerk friends.”

And so it happened that year that the newest Counselor to serve the Ambassador of the United States to the Court of St. James was a tiger. As the Secretary of State had just fired nearly all of his staff, the Ambassador was delighted to welcome this new, energetic, and sharp-toothed aide. Indeed, Tomaso was regarded as one of the most charming diplomats at the Embassy, a staunch defender of the environment and wildlife worldwide, and yet a patriot from head to tiger toe. Happily, to Tomaso’s diplomat friends, his horizontal stripes suggested not strangeness, nonconformity, or unlicensed behavior, but the United States flag.