Uncovered (Dev and Lee Book 4)

Once again, in the electronic edition I am pleased to include the bonus story I wrote to thank my fans for buying a thousand copies of “Divisions” in its first year of publication. “Getting To Sleep” is the second exploration outside Dev and Lee's perspectives in this series (“Heart” being the first), this time joining Lee's father following the traumatic events at the end of “Divisions.”

If you have not read “Divisions,” you should still be able to follow the events of this book, but at the very least you should go pick that one up, even if you don't want to go back to the beginning of the series. “Divisions” and “Uncovered” were originally written as two halves of a single book and still work best when read that way.

Thank you all for allowing me to write more of my favorite fox and tiger couple. It means more to me than I can say that you have grown to love them as much as I do. I hope you'll enjoy this installment of their adventures.

-
Kyell Gold, July 2014

Lee’s Guide to Football

When I was seven, I had a bunch of classmates ask me whether I wanted the Devils or the Firebirds to win the championship. I didn’t know what they were talking about. My dad liked football, but I liked stories, and I may have said a couple things I shouldn’t have about people who liked to watch thugs run around on a field and hit each other. So while my mom was combing the playground sand out of my face and chest and tail, my dad started to explain football to me.

Even though I was still at that age where I wanted to be like my dad, I didn’t have much interest in football. But with the championship coming up, he thought it was the perfect time to get me started. Whatever else he’s done in his life—and I’ve run through the list more than once—he got me into football. So if you’re one of those kids who likes chess and books, listen up, because reading this story you’re in the middle of is like growing up in Nicholas Dempsey Middle School. You don’t have to like football to get through it, as my dad told me, but it helps.

See, what I always hated about football was that I was bad at it. I’d only played one football game up to then, at camp. I didn’t understand the rules. To me, it was just a stupid excuse for big kids to beat up little kids. What my dad told me is that football is actually like a chess game.

Hang on. Stay with me. Imagine you’ve got these eleven guys. Each one can move in a certain way. You want to advance your position (symbolized by the football) up the field, either by giving it to a piece and having him carry it forward, or by passing it to a piece down the field. The guys who line up right at the boundary are the offensive line—like a bulwark. Behind them stands the quarterback, and behind him the halfback (or running back) and fullback. They’re the ones who will carry the ball if you choose to run it. Out to the edges are the speedy guys whose job is to run down the field and be ready if you choose to throw the ball: the wide receivers and tight end.

Your quarterback is like a queen (and believe me, more of them are than you’d think). He’s the most powerful piece and he directs the offense. Wolves and lions make good quarterbacks, because they have this inbred pack mentality. The offensive line is like pawns: they only move a very short distance, and their job is to protect the queen. You get big, aggressive guys in there, like bears and boars, because they also have to move the defenders in such a way as to leave room for the running back to run through. This is harder than it sounds, but I’m not going to get into it. The tight end (yes, we’ve all heard the jokes) either helps block or runs a short way down the field to act as a receiver. Then you’ve got the running back and fullback, wolverines and horses most often, who are like the bishops: they have to move through the spaces cleared by the pawns. The knights would be the tight end and the slot receiver, who can either help defend or jump short distances down the field. And wide receivers are rooks, who take advantage of long open columns to run down the field. For all those last ones, you get deer, cheetahs, and foxes. And what you have to do with these pieces is design a strategy that will help you gain ground, program a series of moves in advance, and watch them go. Meanwhile, our opponent has his own eleven guys, and he’s trying to figure out what your guys are going to do so he can stop them.

If you’re defending, your aim is to stop the progress of the other team. This is the part of football I hated, by the way, because I could never tackle, and they could flatten me with one arm. The QB starts out with the ball, so you go after him. You look at the situation on the field, you look at the way the pieces are set up, and you set up your guys to hopefully disrupt what the offense is doing. Your defensive line, setting up across from the offensive line, is actually attacking, which is why the best ones tend to be large, fast predators, like big cats. Then you have a bunch of guys that stay behind the defensive line to mess with the wide receivers and tight end if they get back into that territory. The best ones there are medium-weight predators, like coyotes, bigger foxes, and cheetahs. And because it’s such a big field, you have to decide things like do you assign one defender to each specific offensive player, or do the defenders just cover sections of the field, and so on.

And then, not to make things more complicated, but there’s everything else, which is called “special teams.” If a team doesn’t move the ball well enough on offense, they end up kicking it, either to the other team (a punt) or through the goal, if they’re close enough. Horses and rabbits, of course, usually do the kicking. On the other side, you need someone quick and slick to catch the kick and try to run it back, and while you get a couple rabbits who are good at this, the best ones have always been weasels and otters.

The thing that makes football more interesting than chess is that the pieces can actually think (well, some of them) and make decisions on the field. They know what they’re supposed to do, but if they see something that’ll block them, they can make an adjustment and change it. Sometimes they do really stupid things, which is fun, and sometimes they do amazing things, which is even more fun.

Also, I mean, it’s guys in tight clothes. There are closeup shots of the quarterback sticking his paws under the center’s tail (with some definite touching). There’s muscles galore, occasional tail-grabbing, and after the plays, there’s butt-patting. What’s not to like?

QUICK REFERENCE: Here’s how the players line up on a typical play.

Dev’s Game-Day Briefing

Okay, with Lee telling you what all the players are supposed to do, I can walk you through how an actual game goes. The teams flip a coin at the beginning of the game. Winner gets to pick whether they want to kick off or receive. To receive means you start on offense and have the first chance to score. But sometimes teams want to kick off, because if you start the first half on defense, you start the second half on offense. Also if you stop the other team right away on the first drive, it gives you a lot of energy going into your offense. The coaches all figure this out. I just know I liked being first on the field.

When a team gets the ball, they line up like Lee described. They get four chances to move the ball ten yards; those are “downs.” So there’s first down, second down, third down, fourth down. I don’t know why they’re called that, they just are. Anyway, on first down usually you try to run the ball. That means the QB hands it to the RB and he tries to get ten yards up the field. Actually, if he gets four or five, that’s pretty good, and then on second down you might try to run it again. If you can get three or four yards every time you run the ball, you can just run it all day long.

The thing is, though, if you don’t get your ten yards in four tries, the other team gets the ball. So most of the time you only take three tries, and if you don’t get ten yards, you punt. Punting is where the punter kicks the ball down the field and the other team gets to catch it and try to run back with it. Basically you do that so that they don’t get the ball at the spot where you didn’t get your ten yards. This is called “field position,” as in having good field position (near the other team’s goal) or bad field position (near your own).

The other thing you can do on fourth down, if you have good field position, is kick a field goal. If you’ve gotten close to the other team’s goal, but not actually into it, you have your kicker try to kick the ball through the goalposts (the uprights, we call the arms on either side), and you get three points if he makes it.

Once you get your ten yards, you get a whole new set of downs. This keeps up until you punt, or get a field goal, or score a touchdown by getting into the other team’s goal. Or—this is where I come in—until one of your players loses the ball and the other team gets it. It has to be a “live” ball, which is complicated and there are lots of rules around it but essentially it means that the play isn’t over yet. So if your running back drops the ball and I pick it up, or your quarterback is a crappy passer and I get the pass before his receiver does, then that’s a “change of possession” and the ball belongs to us. We can run it back as far as we can on that play, then our offense takes over on the next one.

That’s why I love playing defense. We get to be in on the big plays, the game-changing ones that “turn the tide,” “shift the momentum,” whatever you want to call it. There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you get your paws on the ball as a defender. Nothing.

Not to say there’s nothing better. Just nothing like it.

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