“Shut up! Stow it!” he said, in a voice verging on the hysterical. “That’s all a lot of crap, and I’m sick of listening to it! If this storm wants to kill us, it will, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” He turned savagely on his younger brothers. “You two, get us something to eat, instead of standing there like idiots!”

Below, picking up tins of corned beef from the floor, Drew murmured that Nat was acting strange.

“No, he ain’t,” said Eliot. “He’s pretty much acting like Nat.”

“It’s different this time,” Drew said, although he could not articulate in what way.

His own crisis had passed. He wasn’t going to cry again, no matter what happened, but not because crying was unmanly. He’d broken into tears earlier because he’d forgotten, in the fright of the moment, that the hurricane had no intention of ending his short life. His life did not make any difference to the hurricane, so it was foolish to take the storm personally. The trouble with Nat was that he took almost everything personally. He couldn’t get into his head that his life also was not the hurricane’s concern. None of their lives were. Drew did not agree that there was nothing to be done. Their lives did not depend on the storm’s whims, but on the actions they took in the storm. It was up to them and maybe to luck, as well.

He split the cans with a hatchet (the opener had vanished amid the wreckage in the cabin) and dumped the contents into two tin platters. On deck, they all shoveled the food into their mouths with their fingers. Very shortly, they heard the rumbling again.

It swelled in seconds to a thunderous vibration, like a hundred locomotives speeding through a tunnel. The seas built up and tightened. All ran as high as the foremast—about thirty feet, but every now and then, one lifted another ten feet, nearly to the height of the mainmast. The schooner skated down the faces exceptionally fast; too fast for safety. Will noticed, by the way the cable was swinging wildly astern, that the sea anchor was gone. Either it had broken off entirely, or its canvas had been shredded, leaving nothing but a bent metal frame and fifty fathoms of line to restrain the ship.

“Brace!” Will cried.