Nat struck out at whatever or whoever frightened or threatened or confused him—in the gale last year, he had yelled at the wind—and Eliot joked or sang his way through the dark and scary places; Drew subdued his terrors with his reason, confined the powers of the unknown within a corral of knowledge. Once, when he was nine, an awesome thunderstorm had driven him to hide under the bed, where he lay quivering alongside Trajan. He felt so foolish, finding refuge with a frightened cat, that he went to the library the next day and began to study up on thunderstorms. He versed himself in the formation of cumulonimbus, on the causes of atmospheric instability, on updrafts and convection currents. Now, when a bad storm struck, he would tell himself that what looked like a blazing, jagged arm intent on his destruction was nothing more than the separation of an electrical charge caused by the interaction of water and ice crystals in the storm cloud; he would mutter to himself, with each ear-splitting, window-rattling crash, “That is only the sound of a shock wave caused by the extreme heating and expansion of the air as the lightning channel passes through it.” He would utter such phrases over and over, in much the same way as an Amazonian shaman, cowering in his hut while heaven roars and blazes, utters incantations to quiet the wrath of his pagan gods. Drew’s scientific chants did not prevent his heart from leaping when lightning flashed, nor his body from flinching when thunder cracked, but they did give him mastery over his fears. He no longer hid under the bed with Trajan. That was the difference between being a human and a cat.