Robber Crabs

by Joan Druett

Wiki had read about, Komodo dragon poison was slow-acting, but always did its deadly work in the end.

  So, just to check that he didn’t need to keep looking over his shoulder, Wiki said, “Are there just crabs and birds on this island, or other animals, too?”

  “Wa’al, there sure ain’t no people,” said Hank, and laughed. Then he hunkered down and plucked up another huge robber crab as it crawled out from between two rocks. This one was yellow, with orange patches, and put up as big a fight as the other, though in the same slow-moving kind of way.

  Wiki already knew the island was uninhabited. Stretching out the mouth of the canvas bag to receive the yellow and orange crab, he said, “But what about taniwha?”

  “What?”

  Taniwha was the Maori word for legendary lizards and dragons, but instead of going into complicated explanations, Wiki said, “Snakes” — which was easy, because he disliked snakes almost as much as he did the prospect of buttock-biting, man-eating Komodo-style taniwha.

  “I can’t say I’ve seen any snakes,” said Hank. “That New Zealand native word you used, is that what your people call snakes in your country?”

  “We don’t have any snakes in New Zealand.”

  “Ah,” said Hank, and nodded with a knowing smirk. “So that be why you’re so scared of them.”

  Wiki said, “I just don’t like coming across them, that’s all.”

  “Wa’al, I haven’t come across any snakes here. Tell the truth,” Hank meditated, “I reckon the red crabs would have eaten them, right when they were small, because I think red crabs eat just about anything.” He paused to shake down the robber crab. It landed on the other crab with a sort of hollow rattle, followed by quite a lot of clattering as the creatures got accustomed to each other.

  Moving on to another mud pool, he said, “That’s why there ain’t no scrub or underbrush in amongst these here trees. See those red crabs, them that are not as big as robber crabs? Well, there are thousands of them, only you don’t see even the half of them, on account of they’re down in their holes in the ground. I’ve seen them red crabs drag seeds and leaves down into those holes, and they eat them there, I reckon. Those holes are a kind of larder, and if there be any snakes or lizards, then they are down those holes too, as dead as last week’s mutton. I reckon they catch them when they are little, only just hatched out of the egg.”

  Wiki was silent, surprised at such deep thought in a Great Lakes seafarer; Hank, he decided, was proving to be surprising altogether. Then he heard a nearby scratching, and looked down to see a brilliant green and blue robber crab slowly and surreptitiously investigating his boot — to see if it was edible, or so he supposed as he stepped rather hastily away. As he plucked it up, he wondered if the crabs themselves were eatable, and rather hoped that they were. The food on the Yankee trader was generous in quantity, but fibrous and very uninteresting in style, which was quite a change after a steady diet of fish and meat with vegetables cooked seven different ways, served with rice and savory sauces.

  Wondering what the crabs tasted like, he said, “So what do robber crabs eat?”

  “Coconuts, of course.”

  That made sense, Wiki thought, as the robber crabs looked like the coconut crabs he was accustomed to seeing in the Pacific, except they were a great deal more colorful. It also promised well for a sweet and nutty flavor.

  He said, “Do you know why Captain O’Malley is carrying coconuts to Sydney?”

  “To turn their meat into oil,” said Hank, proving yet again to be a surprising fount of information. “It’s a business Mrs. O’Malley is very interested in, on account of she’s an apothecary. Coconut oil is big business, not just for lubrication, but for apothecary stuff, too.”

  “An apothecary?” Wiki echoed. It was a word he had read, but had never expected to hear spoken.

  “Aye. A kind of herb woman. She’s awaitin’ the ship in Sydney, and then she will come aboard of us, I reckon. The crew all reckon so, too, and that’s why they’re all so sour.”

  “She’s not an easy shipmate?”

  “Horrible temper, she has. Known all about the Pacific as Witchwoman Kate, not on account that she is a witch, you understand, but on account of her temper, and that she’s a herb woman, too. That’s why our skipper married her, or so they tell me.”

  Wiki waited while Hank scooped up another robber crab. This one was purple, with red splotches, and was even larger than the others. When it was safely inside the sack, he said, “They say that he married her for her herbal skills?”

  “Aye. He worries a powerful lot about his health, our captain does, which is why he was willing to put up with her nasty moods, even if it was bondage for life. Fancies hisself sick a-constant.”

  “Does he now?” said Wiki. He had served once before under a captain who fancied himself sick all the time, much to the crew’s amusement. His hypochondria had turned out to be justified, though, because the captain had dropped dead in the middle of issuing orders to the helm.

  He said, “I’m surprised Mrs. O’Malley doesn’t sail with Captain O’Malley all the time.”

  “Oh, she does, as a rule. But afore we left Sydney they had a terrible row, and he set sail afore she could make it on board. Not that they don’t go a-quarrelling all the time, but this was a famous fight, it was. I reckon they still talk about it, them folks in New South Wales. She told him, along with all the rest of the world, that she was proper sorry that she had ever married such a stone-hearted bastard, and then she called him a lubberly rascal, and Captain O’Malley got into such a rage that he sailed without her — though not without making sure he had a store of her precious elixir on board.”

  “Leaving her a-hollering on the wharf?” Wiki asked with amusement.

  “No, not like that. He simmered down enough to send me to the boarding house to fetch her, but when I come back and reported that I couldn’t find her nowhere, that she had packed her duds and gone away, he flew into another rage and weighed anchor.” Hank kicked over a rock to get at another crab. This robber crab was yellow with red splotches, and by the time it was shoved inside, the bag was full.

  Wiki unfolded a second bag, and he and Hank set to capturing more huge crabs. Time was running out, so they worked in silence — a silence that was filled with the loud pattering and splash of the waterfall, and the faint hissing of crabs as they sidled through the wallows. There was no sound at all from the trees, just the occasional scream of a large white bird as it flopped from one branch to another.

  Then the bags were packed as full of robber crabs as they could get them, and Hank set off towards the beach, where a boat was waiting just clear of the blow-holes in the black, jagged reef. Wiki, following him, thought that with luck they would be back on board for dinner.

  “How do these crabs cook?” he asked.

  “They don’t.”

  “They eat raw?”

  “They don’t eat at all, not nohow. Captain O’Malley puts them in the hold to look after his coconuts.”

  “What!” Yet again, Wiki was amazed. “But don’t the crabs steal them?”

  “Only a few, and Captain O’Malley reckons that’s a small price to pay, just to make sure that the men don’t get a chance to eat up his cargo, like them mutineers on the Bounty. Anything that ventures into the hold after we’ve dropped them robber crabs down there is bound to come out sore enough for certain.”

  “But what about my dog?” Wiki exclaimed.

  “He’d have to be pretty stupid to follow them crabs down there.”

  “He was doing a good job!”

  “Captain O’Malley don’t care about your dog,” Hank retorted. “Not one little damn bit at all.”

  Wiki was still feeling offended on behalf of the dog as he clambered over the starboard gangway. The dog, however, showed its usual lack of gratitude by delivering him the usual look of utter contempt from his favorite patch by the galley door.

  The dog was an attractive animal in a ragam
uffin way, being of the terrier sort, with a patch over one eye, and one floppy ear, which was the reason Wiki had shipped on this American trader, instead of trying to carry him on board a Bugis brig or a pinisi schooner. While he hadn’t really believed the stories of Oriental people eating cats and dogs, a lot of the tidbits of meat he had been eating over the past six months had been unidentifiable, and he hadn’t seen any dogs and cats on native brigs and schooners, either. And so he had decided to ship on the trader, where the dog was unlikely to be part of the rations. But no sooner had the Rinto got underway than the dog had abandoned him in favor of the cook, taking up his residence in the shelter of the galley, and ignoring him from then on.

  Obviously, it was cupboard love, as the dog demonstrated when he made friends with the cabin steward too, because the steward, like the cook, was a reliable source of tasty scraps. Nonetheless, Wiki felt rather miffed, though it was wonderful to see the friendship that developed between the cook and the dog, which the cook — a Greek from a fishing hamlet on Long Island, New York — had named Hector. And Hector had certainly earned his rations, by proving himself to be a capital ratter. When he wasn’t sunning himself by the galley, he was down in the depths of the hold, never emerging without several dead rats to add to his rapidly growing score — which made the captain’s decision to stock the hold with robber crabs seem illogical. But then, as the