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panicking, I put my head back, wheezing, coughing up brine. Yet still
I would not let go of what I had caught. I clutched it to my chest with
one hand even as I struggled to stay afloat. Evolutionary biologists
have identified a rule they call the life/dinner principle. A predator
puts less effort into the chase than its prey: if the hunter fails it loses
only its dinner, if the hunted fails it loses its life. In this case the equa-
tion was reversed.
Breathing raggedly, lying on my back, I kicked towards the rocks
until the water was just shallow enough, with my chin raised, for me
to stand. I tiptoed to the reef, slithered over the weed and sat on a
boulder, still panting, still pressing the creature against my wetsuit. I
lowered it onto the rock and studied it. It looked like the grab used to
lift crushed cars in a scrap-metal yard. Its claws were more than two
feet from tip to tip, powerfully ridged and bossed, crenallated on the
cutting edges. Every leg ended in a long black spike, which it had used
to embed itself in the mud when I had tried to lever it out. Now the
monstrous spider crab curled up and played dead. The only move-
ments I could see were the bubbles which fizzed and popped from
under its carapace.
Its shell was covered in weed and sponges: it had not yet moulted.
It bulged with the suggestion of muscle like a Roman suit of armour.
It was guarded with gothic spines and pinnacles, each surrounded by
a ring of short bristles, and fringed with spikes like the Statue of Lib-
erty, extending between the eyes into a pair of horns. The underside of
the monster was covered in smooth articulated plates. It looked like a
rock that had crept into life. Beneath its robot joints, its mineral crust,
it scarcely seemed animate. I thought of these heavy creatures trun-
dling out of the depths at the end of winter, slowly converging on the
shore, and wondered what, among the disaggregated ganglia that
pass for the crustacean brain, they perceived, what spirit moved
beneath the expressionless shell. It was a male, which meant that I
could keep it.
I travelled up the coast to look for clear water. Two miles to the
north of Llansglodion the dunes billowed onto clean sand. I walked
down the beach and into the sea. The water was bright enough to let
the sun sparkle on the seabed. There was no chance of losing my way
here: the ripples on the seafloor ran north to south, and as the waves
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