Once upon a time, in a little town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina, there lived a pair of brothers. They had been born during the Depression, and were raised by their mother after their father "wandered off to look for work in Tennessee," which may be a euphemism for something someone decided was too dark to be comfortably handed down through generations.

If you were a cartoonist or an illustrator of children's books, you might render slightly older brother Phil as a shambling bear with kind brown eyes and younger brother Jack as a blue-eyed young rabbit with an earnest anxiousness to please about him. If you think these two do not seem much like brothers, then you are on the same page as a lot of the people who lived in their little town.