Night Crabbing

     They’re ugly to look at, if not downright repulsive, and decidedly unsanitary in their feeding habits, if not utterly nauseating, but in spite of these disgusting credentials the common Caribbean land crab, Brachyura cardisoma, once was considered a rare delicacy, and was often featured on dining-room menus in elegant hotels all across the arc of islands from Hispaniola to Trinidad.
     The first man or woman who ever ate one of the suckers had a lot more courage than Doris Elsie Boudreau’s oldest son will ever have, even at the point of starvation, I want to tell you so right at the beginning. That first man or woman, incidentally, was almost certainly a gastronomic martyr deserving of a statue, for the fact is that land crabs, in their generality, are poisonous to eat until they’ve been purged of the corruptions that arise from their habitat and their lifestyle. I will describe the most common purification process in a moment, if you’re patient, but first you need to know a little more about the wretched lives of these unfortunate creatures.
     Tropical land crabs are carnivore scavengers with a preference for minute carrion that has died and putrefied around the swampy holes in which they live. They thrive on any form of protein in all stages of decomposition, with a notable fondness for the later stages: dead insects, rotting worms, ripe crustaceans and such fare. Yech. You don’t need an advanced degree in nutrition to understand that these are very dangerous creatures to eat, if you love life. Gastronomes in China, who are far and away the most adventuresome eaters in the world, have recognized that fact and have been known to enquire about the provenance of land crabs set before them. That says a lot.
     Now, I must admit that I don’t know the exact purification process of choice on the island of Grenada. I assume there is one but somehow I never asked. Maybe I’m not cut out for this kind of journalism. I can tell you what they do in Jamaica, however, because that’s an island I know a thing or two about. They take a high-sided washtub over there, one of those galvanized-iron jobs that people use to wash clothes, and to hose down kids in once in a while, and they line the bottom with clean rocks about the size of a man’s fist. Then they pour in a couple of gallons of fresh water and a slurry of corn meal mush, very thick, and finally the crabs, maybe half a dozen at a time, depending on their size. After three days of forced immersion in this vegetarian soup it’s assumed that the crabs are as saintly as Mother Theresa and can bring no harm to addicted human consumers.
     Statistics bear out the efficacy of this procedure, and I have it on good evidence that only nine Jamaicans have died so far this year from eating land crabs after they were purified. It was in the newspaper.
     A fully grown land crab can measure nearly nine inches across the carapace, and like their marine cousins they have ten legs, of which eight are low-slung under the body for running and leaping, and two in front for ripping and crushing. The claws on their front legs are strong enough to chop through oyster shell, and the bones in a man’s hand are no challenge at all. Land crabs are incredibly fast, moreover, and dangerously aggressive. If you happen to be standing between a mature land crab and his hole, you’d best jump aside and let it pass or in the blink of an eye he’ll be climbing up your leg with only one thought in mind. Unless, that is, you know how to catch them.
     Abijah Bryden knows a good deal about catching land crabs. His techniques are so practiced and so refined that he can catch them blindfolded, so I’ve heard. When I first learned about this remarkable man, nothing else would do, I simply had to meet him. Maybe if he were kindly disposed he’d even show me how it’s done.
     Abijah isn’t a professional crab-catcher, understand. There aren’t many of those around any more. They’re a vanishing breed of men, now that better opportunities are opening up in international tourism in all the islands. When you come right down to it, nobody in modern time has ever become a professional crab-catcher except in desperation, when all else has failed and the only alternative is starving to death.
     Crab catchers have long been considered the lowest of the low on the socio-economic ladder, therefore, and here in the Eastern Caribbean you have got to be careful how you use that term because on many islands it’s considered an insult. I point this out for those of you who have yet to read V. S. Naipaul’s novel, A House for Mr. Biswas. Abijah Bryden is a devoted amateur crab catcher, and that word makes all the difference.
     As a matter of fact, Abijah has a bona fide degree in economics from Georgetown University, and he had a long and distinguished career with a New York brokerage firm before retiring and returning to his home in Grenada to catch crabs. Of course it’s possible, I don’t know, that the sequence runs the other way, and that Abijah was a crab catcher before he became a stockbroker. That would explain a lot of things, since the aptitudes for both occupations are not far different.
     Anyway, it was my great pleasure eventually to meet Abijah Bryden, and such is his affection for his avocation that we had hardly finished shaking hands when he invited me to accompany him on a crab hunt the next moonless night.
     “You mean out there in the dark?”
     “Yep. You don’t catch crabs in the daytime, especially the big ones.”
     “I see. And what does that come down to, a couple of hours in the evening?”
     “No, mon. Usually it means all night. Catching crabs is slow      ”
     It was raining hard and the night was as black as a stockbroker’s margin call when Abijah braked his Bronco to a stop at the dinghy dock where I was waiting.
     “Hop in, Cleon. Never mind the mud. We’ll get us some crabs tonight for sure.“
     I climbed into the four-wheel drive with a lingering glance at my dinghy tied up at the dock. Maybe on a miserable night like this I’d be a lot better off curled up with a book on board Melibea.
     “We got lucky with the rain,” Abijah said. “It drives the crabs out in the open.”
     “It does?”
     “Yeah. Their holes get flooded and they wander.”
     “Wander, right. I hear you.... We got lucky.”
     Abijah drove us ten or twelve miles north along the west coast of Grenada, then turned inland a short distance and parked near a good crabbing spot that he know. With regard to the reportorial principles of truthfulness and full disclosure, I’ve been sworn to secrecy and can’t divulge the exact location of the place, if you should be inclined to ask. But mother of God it was dark at the edge of that swamp.
     “Here,” Abijah said as he sorted through the jumble of gear in the back of the FWD, “you take the sack and the flashlight.”
     “Okay, then I follow you out, right?”
     “No, mon, you walk point. Just keep that flashlight going when we get inside around the mangroves.” Abijah took off his sneakers then and rolled up the legs of his pants. I made to do the same. We set out barefoot.
     “Listen, Abijah,” I offered cautiously, “I don’t know a goddam thing about catching crabs. They never told me a freakin’ word about it, you know, at the university....”
     “I’m not surprised,” he replied. “Those ivy-league jamocos, whadda they know about anything important anyway? You just walk on ahead with the flashlight, and keep it swinging.”
     Five minutes later we were shlepping through squishy stuff up over our naked ankles and stumbling over tangles of mangrove root-buttresses whose only evident purpose in life was to bring crab catchers down flat on their faces in the mud.
     I’m swinging the flashlight left and right according to instruction, when of a sudden two little emeralds of light show up in the beam, and Abijah places a hand on my shoulder.
     “Well, now,” he whispered. “Here’s our first one. He ain’ big, but he’ll do for a start. Keep the light in his eyes.”
     It isn’t hard to fixate a land crab with a flashlight. Their eyes bulge out on tiny stalks and you really can’t miss. I mean, they can see all around, nearly 360 degrees, as I understand their capabilities, and all you have to do is aim the light in their general direction and it blinds the bejesus out of them.
     “He’ll be wantin’ to attack the light,” Abijah whispered. “If he comes at you fast with his claws up, just switch it off and he’ll stop and wait a few seconds.”
     The crab was out there not five feet away, reared back with his claws raised high and open in attack stance, waiting. I turned off the flashlight, just to check our defenses.
     “No!” Abajah hissed. “Not yet, dammit! And they tol’ me you had a degree an’ all. Jesus!”      I fumbled with the flashlight switch and hurriedly pushed it on again. The crab hadn’t moved, but his claws were an inch or two lower than before, and he had all eight of his aft legs spidered down in the mud, as if to find solid ground from which to launch a decisive frontal assault. Very carefully I stepped back to widen the distance between us.
     “Easy...easy now,” Abijah muttered, “this is the tricky part. Go very slow and easy...he hates the light...he wants to kill that light...he wants to kill that light and tear it apart if he can get at it. Raise it up a little higher...that’s right...now off to one side so he’ll miss if he jumps at you. That crab connects with you, he chops your balls off clean at the joint like you never had any balls.”
     Involuntarily my left hand strayed down to cover the joint in question.
    “Steady now, stea-day...yeah, just like that...now move the light in small circles...slooowly...slooowly...keep it right in his eyes. He’ll begin to move forward.” The crab began to move forward, a little dizzily it seemed to me.
     “See that? You’ve got him hypnotized now. There’s lots of interesting tricks in this game.”
     Abijah came up from behind, then, moving easy and nonchalant. The man has style, no doubt about that. With a sudden wide sweep of arms he clamped his hands around the crab’s claws, lifted our prize up out of the mud and held it high.
     “Hah! What a pushover. He’s not full grown yet, but that’s the juicy kind. We’ll peg his claws and put him in the sack.”
     “Right! Into the sack with him! How we gonna peg his claws?”
     “Easy. You hold the crab, I put the pegs in.”
     “I hold the...crab.... You’re joking.”
     The silence that followed was long, deep, and serious. Evidently Abijah wasn’t joking in the least. He really wanted me to do what he said, hold that land crab in my hands while he put pegs in the claws.
     “Abijah, I....”
     “Listen, Cleon. You wanted to learn how to catch crabs, right? Ever stop to think what you do with them once you’ve got one in your hands?”
     “Not really. Maybe I should’ve, though. I begin to see now....”
     “All right then. We’ve got two possibilities here. We either peg his claws and put him in the sack, or I let him loose right here in the mud. I let him loose, it ain’t gonna be anywhere near my legs. You hear me?”
     My hearing is all shot to hell, anybody will tell you that, but I heard every phoneme Abijah Bryden was saying. He was saying if he had to set that crab loose, he intended to put him down right at my feet, and run. Goose bumps started at my ankles and climbed right up to my crotch. I could feel them climbing.
     “You’re coming in loud and clear. Show me how to grab him.”
     Abijah brought the crab close to my face. “Here’s how it’s done,” he said. “You hold this claw at the tip with one hand and give me the flashlight with the other.”
     I clamped my fist around the claw that was offered and squeezed hard. God damn, but that claw was powerful. The crab’s thick extensor muscle was raging and seething in frantic spasms inside the shell beneath my fingers, trying to break my grip.      “Hold ‘im steady, Cleon, for chrissake! Okay. Now gimme the flashlight. Yeah, just like that. You all right?”
     “Swell. What next?”
     “Now the other claw. Get a good grip and hold it. I’m gonna let go now.” Abijah let go and stepped back. “There. You’ve got ‘im.”
     That was an interesting point of view. Like when they pushed Christians out to the lions. Get a good grip and hold on.
     Abijah fished around in his pockets and came up with a handful of small wooden wedges he had whittled down from a dry thorn bush. Taking his sweet time about it he shone the flashlight on his fistful of pegs and pushed them around in his palm.
&nbbsp;      sp;    “Hmmm.... No, not that one...not sharp enough at the point...this one looks okay...no, wait. Here’s a better one. Yeah, we’ll go with this one. You ready, Cleon?”
     And saying that, Abijah tucked the flashlight under his left arm, grabbed one leg of the crab where I was holding him out at arm’s length, and drove a peg through the soft cartilage of the claw at the joint where the two jaws meet.
     “There. He won’t be chopping your nuts off from that side,” Abijah said.
     “Praise the Lord.”
     “Amen.”
     Quickly then Abijah disabled the other claw in the same way and took the enraged crab from my hands.
     “Okay, that’s a good crab now,” he said. “Open the sack and dump him in.”
     The crab sack was tied to my belt, its bottom end resting in the mud. I loosened the drawstring at the top and in went Mr. Crab.
     “You like crabmeat, Cleon?”
     “Yeah, sure. Stone crab. Alaska king crab...sure. I lived in Maryland six or seven years. People up there go real big for soft shell crab. Slides down real good with beer.”
     “Aw, hell, ocean crabs don’ have any flavor, None at all, and they’re salty. Jus’ wait till you try one of these. They’ve got the taste of the swamp. You’ll love it.”
     “I can hardly wait. But listen, Abijah, what I really want to know is how you ever manage when you’re out here crabbing all alone.”
     “No big problem. They’re all instinct, you know. They’ve got very little brain. After a while you get so you can generally figure out what they’ll do next. Not always, though, because they can be unpredictable, too. Scare the shit out of you sometimes, how you figure they’ll do one thing and they do just the opposite. I’ve had them climbing right up my arm when I thought it was my leg they were after.”
     “Crazy. But that’s not what I meant. How do you manage to peg the claws and hold them at the same time?”
     “Easy. I grab them, like you saw, then I bring their legs together and hold both claws in one hand.”
     “My God. And what if they break loose?”
     “They don’t. Not when I grab them. Oh, once in a while you get one that’s bigger than most, and meaner, so first thing I cool him out with a little rum.”
     “With whaaat?”
     “I settle him down with rum. 151-proof white rum. I’ve got a pint in my pocket right now. What you do is hold the crab with one hand, see, and pour a little rum on a rag. Then you put the rag over his face and keep it there a while. Knocks him right out.”
     “Maybe you should’ve done that with the crab we just caught. He looked plenty mean to me.”
     “Mean” Sheeeit. You ain’ seen mean yet. An’ anyway, no sense in wastin good rum. You an’ I gonna be drinkin’ that rum before this night is over. But all right, let’s move along now. Sling that sack over your shoulder. You don’ wanna let it drag in the mud any more, once you got crab in it.”
     It was going on eleven o’clock and the rain had stopped when our next crab shone up in the flashlight beam. We were walking on slightly higher ground now, and the mud wasn’t quite as deep. It barely squished through our toes. The crab was off to one side. Abijah saw it before I did.
     “Good size,” he whispered. “Turn around backwards and walk right on by, but go slow. I’ll stay behind. Keep the light on him the best you can. Pull him away from his hole.”
     I did as I was told but the crab wasn’t having any of it. I never even saw him dive into his hole. One moment he was there in plain view, a microsecond later he was gone. Vanished. Just like that. Big motha.
     “The high ground favors them,” Abijah explained. “Their holes stay dry. Every damn crab in this dry ground has his own hole. Some of them have six, seven, eight holes, and they know exactly where they are when they want them. We could shovel mud down this one and piss on it. Sometimes that makes them come up if you wait long enough. But not tonight. We got us a good night for crabbin’. There’s hundreds of them down in the wet swamp. They’ll be a little smaller, but plenty of ‘em. Come on.”
     Just as Abijah predicted, crabs weren’t lacking in the mangrove swamp when we got back into it. They were scurrying all around like rabbits in an Australian shoot down.
     “Nocturnals,” Abijah said.
     “What?”
     “They come up and move around late at night. It’s their biorhythm. They get hungry during the day, but they wait. The smartest of them wait. You don’t see a lot of big crabs before midnight. And tonight their holes are flooded with all the rain. That one over there, let’s take him.”
     We took four crabs in the next hour, and lost three others that just shied away as we approached. With each successful catch I was getting better with the flashlight. I even began to experiment with it. Once you’ve got him hypnotized, you can make a land crab sway with the light, side to side, up and then down, turn to the left, turn to the right... They get so mad and so frustrated they begin foaming at the mouth.
     “Hey, Abijah. This is cool. Watch.”
     “Yeah, yeah. I know all abou...,” He stopped dead silent and stared hard ahead at a mound of mud ahead of us big enough to cast a wide shadow in the flashlight beam.
     I froze.
     “Cleon,” Abijah’s voice had dropped a couple of octaves and the urgency in it made my skin crawl.
     “What, what?”
     “Crab. Big son of a bitch. Right up ahead.”
     I shone the light ahead and held it steady on a mound of something about a foot in diameter, maybe a little more. “It’s a mud pile, Abijah.”
  “Aint no mud pile. Cannibal crab, come down from the high ground.”
     “Jesus. Are you sure?” I twitched the light back and forth over the mound and saw the thing move. Two eyes emerged, big as marbles and shining like trophy emeralds. Slowly, with great deliberation, the enormous crab rose up out of the mud and let himself be seen, huge, Antaean, shaggy. His claws looked like baseball mitts. “Oh ...my...God,” I breathed out slowly.
     “There’s no hole in here big enough for him...he’ll have to fight,” Abijah whispered. He was muttering mostly to himself, pondering on the crab’s alternatives, and our own. “He’s into this swamp for the same reason we are...this is his hunting ground...we’re poaching in his hunting ground...he’ll have to fight.”
     “Who’s he going to fight with?”
     “We have to separate or we’ll never get him. You hold on to the flashlight, and keep that sack in front of you. I’ll edge off to the side.”
     “Separate? Keep the sack in front? What the hell are you saying? You mean you want to catch that thing? I don’t believe this. You’re out of your effing mind. No way, mon. I’m out of here.”
     Abijah was too immersed in details of his battle plan to pay any attention, as if in some kind of trance.
     “We’ll do like we did before,” he continued, whispering. “You try and hold him with the flashlight and I’ll take him from behind. He charges you, turn off the light. He’ll stop, but not for long, so get that light back on again. On and off. On and off. If the light don’t hold him, let him charge the sack. Drop the sack right over him and put your foot on it. Don’t run. He’s too fast.”
     “Fast? You haven’t seen fast yet.”
     “You got all that?”
     “I’m a dead man. We’re both dead.”
     “All right. Let’s move out.” And with that, Abijah Bryden dropped away to one side and quickly disappeared in the surrounding darkness.
     Land crabs can feel the slightest tremor in the ground at an amazing distance from the source of disturbance. Knowledgeable people say crabs can feel a falling leaf touch down, even if it fell day before yesterday. This particular monster, just twenty feet away, easily sensed Abijah’s footsteps and instantly turned toward them. He tilted his body up, way, way up, with his forward underlegs straight and stiff. He raised his claws and spread them wide in the classic Cardisoma fighting stance. His after underlegs remained bent beneath him, loaded and cocked like a crossbow, ready to catapult the crab airborne toward enemy vibrations coming in from the darkness.
     Abijah was well away, making a wide arc around the crab’s right flank, moving quietly. He risked revealing his position long enough to yell at me, “Move in a little closer on him now. Get his attention with the light.”
     A handful of mud sailed through the air and dropped down close by my feet. Plop. Abijah. Trying to divert our antagonist’s attention. The crab turned toward the noise. He turned toward the flashlight. He turned toward me. He waited a moment, evidently trying to decide whether to take me from the front or from both sides at once. And then he charged.
     I have to pause here and admit to a set of very mixed emotions. I mean, really. And never mind about fear. There are emotions of greater importance. Abijah Bryden and I, we’re ankle deep in this stinking mangrove swamp on the island of Grenada at the upper edge of tidal flows that come in and out from the Caribbean Sea, and we’re going eyeball to eyeball with a magnificent dumb creature that in a future million years of evolutionary development couldn’t possibly acquire sufficient technology to come out of his swamp and offer challenge to humanity, and maybe throw us in a sack the way we were intending to do with him. The crab didn’t even have a website, for God’s sake. What is it with some of us humans, anyway? It makes little difference whether we enjoy reading about the killing sports, or enjoy doing them and then writing about them. The psychology comes down to the same source, and it isn’t pretty. I can own up to that now, for my part in it. This cannibal land crab, ugly as sin but beautiful in the yellows and pale oranges of the flashlight beam, wanted nothing more than to be let alone in the muck that was his biome chosen. He could have no idea about the reasons for his torment, no understanding at all about human addiction to the protein in those claws he was waving and threatening to use on us, nor ever even begin to comprehend the brilliant flashlight technology of his doom. Not in a million years.
     The crab’s first rush was unbelievably fast. He came in low, which surprised me, and in a micro-tick of time that could be measured in nanoseconds he covered more than half the distance between us. Even before his frontal attack I had the flashlight going on and off, on and off, in frenzied psychedelics that wouldn’t be out of place at a concert by the Electric Light Orchestra, or in a dance intermission at a Spandex parlor. He hauled up short about eight feet out, rose high on his underlegs, and lifted his claws a full appalling eighteen inches above the ground.
     Terror does strange and unexpected things to men (likewise to women and children, for sure). The crab was calling all the shots, there in the swamp. I would have preferred to run, jump or fly, but instead I froze up tight, immobilized, hypnotized. The flashlight psychedelics ceased – I hadn’t enough strength of will to push the switch again. The beam of light stayed focused on the crab’s eyes, not by design, but in abject surrender. He could begin tearing me apart any time he wanted. What a pushover. And the crab did nothing. He just stood there, unmoving, glowering, threatening, all lit up in the flashlight beam. Why wasn’t he coming on the rest of the way? As crab intelligence goes, this one seemed to have very little on the left of the decimal point.
     Then it dawned on me. Of course. It was the flashlight. Abijah was right all along. The flashlight strategy had worked again, but in my fear I had momentarily forgotten about it. No matter about this crab’s unusual size, he was fixated by the flashlight and he couldn’t move.
     In order to be sure about that, I cautiously turned the light to the left. The crab followed. Then to the right, and again he followed. Well, well. How quickly things can change. Hah! Vae victis, brother.
     I raised the flashlight high in the manner prescribed by General Abijah J. Bryden, then slowly moved ahead toward the stupefied crab. At a distance of less than a yard I began swirling the beam around in tight circles centered on the crab’s eyestalks, and the creature remained absolutely subdued, dominated, obedient. A turn to the left and then to the right. I might have been leading him on a string. Just for the hell of it I put some rhythm in the pageantry.... Swing your partner – ladies to the front row –couples join hands and doe se doe. I had that damn crab going up and down like a yo-yo.
     Then the utterly unthinkable, the ultimately unimaginable horror of horrors happened. I fumbled the flashlight. It dropped from my hand. It fell in the mud. It went out.
     I bent over and reached down instinctively, the way people do when they drop something. My hand was nearly touching the mud and my head was down at about knee-level before the synapses of my rabbit-ass brain got around to notifying my left cerebral hemisphere that what I was doing was definitely unhealthy, and that the crab was still out there, only three feet away from my nose.
     The message did get through eventually, and it turned me to stone. You could’ve knocked chips off with a rock hammer. You could have carted me off to the Louvre and put a sign at my feet: “Man scared pissless, Recently Discovered Marble by August Rodin,” and no art historian in the world would say nay.
     From an immense distance out at the edge of the universe I heard a voice that could have been Abijah’s. “Cleooon,” the voice kept repeating. “Cleooon.... Are you okaaay? Turn on the light, Cleooon.” Several thousand years later I heard it no more, and the silence deepened and became a cold, impenetrable, undifferentiated substance brooding at some forlorn place far beyond the edge of everything that is. Millions of generations of humanity rose and flowered and withered away. Earth itself went cold, then the sun, the nearest stars, the Milky Way Galaxy, the farthest stars until there was nothing left alight in all the cosmos, and eternal frozen blackness reigned where once men danced with crabs.
     Abijah Bryden knows a good deal about catching land crabs, as I’ve said already. His techniques are so practiced and so refined that he can catch them blindfolded, so I’ve heard. A man of that caliber and experience isn’t about to go into a crabbing swamp with only one flashlight, the technology being as unreliable as it is. When he heard no response from that fear-sculpted honky statue which in a weak moment he had invited to go on a crab hunt, he very coolly reached into a front pocket and drew out his backup light, one of those little gizmos given gratis by salesmen promoters of Finlandia vodka. He flicked the switch and advanced toward the killing ground. He shone the light around and came upon (as he tells it) a frigging block of ice that looked like a white man three quarters gone to hell.
     “Cleon for chrissake,” he said, shaking my shoulder. “Why in hell are you bending down like that? An’ where’s our goddam crab?”
     Did I really hear Abijah Bryden say those words? I don’t know. I can’t be sure about the first part, but when he said crab I straightened up and looked around real fast.
     The cannibal crab was gone. In the faint beam thrown by the Finlandia vodka penlight there wasn’t a trace of him. He had evaporated into the mists of cold steam rising out of swampy mud on a night in October, at a place on the west side of Grenada a few miles or so north of St. Georges. I’m sworn to secrecy, so I can’t tell you the exact place, even if I wanted to.
     “It’s like I said,” Abijah offered. “They’re mostly predictable. They don’t have a lot of brain, so you can usually figure what they’ll do. Once in a while, though, you find one that’s a little different. I’ve been studying them a long time. You wanna know what I think? We’ll never really know land crabs. Not in a million years.”

Cleo