The giant crab lies buried to its eyestalks on the flats at low water and takes one left boot from whatever wades past. Only the left. A cannery clerk crossed the flat at Cala Mareira last spring in a laced pair and reached the far side in one boot and a wet sock, with no scratch on his ankle and no memory of the moment. The crab does not bite the foot. It lifts the boot away the way a man lifts the lid off a pot, and the sand closes over the place.
The first paper to mention it is a salt-pan lease from Kinta Sargaço, which excuses the tenant from mending any dike 'broken by the animal.' The lease does not say which animal. Everyone reading it knew. A pilot's chart from some decades later marks the flat with a small drawn claw and the word caranguejo. Later still, a cobbler set up on the Cala Mareira waterfront and made his living selling left boots singly, at a discount, to people who had already lost one. His shop is still there. The crab has never been known to take a right.
Wenceslau Arrais, who reads the tide gauge at the Cala, says the crab on the flat now is the same one his great-grandmother's father cursed from a skiff. I have no way to check this, and I have not tried. What I could check was a cast shell lying above the wrack line. I measured it with a carpenter's two-foot folding rule, opening and refolding it along the shell: five feet three inches across the carapace, the right claw four feet one from hinge to tip, the left smaller by a full foot. The shell was the color of a rusted hinge.
Waders at Cala Mareira cross barefoot with their boots on a pole over the shoulder, and anyone who must wear them leaves an old left boot on a stake at the edge of the flat first. The crab's trail is easy to read: a trench the width of a wheelbarrow, ending in two small pencil holes where the eyestalks went down. On the shelf of packed sand above the burrow stand fourteen left boots, toes to the sea, laces tied.
- Classification
- Giant armored crustacean
- Habitat
- Tidal flats and estuary mouths
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 5 ft across the carapace
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Sea and river shallows
- Binomial
- Macrocarcinus lacunaris
- Diet
- Mussels, stranded fish, old leather
- Temperament
- Sly, territorial, petty