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rolled in towards the shore they knocked little puffs of sand east-
wards. Head down, I could give myself up to that world.
It belonged to the crabs. Hermit crabs, helmeted in cowls and
spires - winkles, turitellas, dogwhelks and topshells - scuttled over
the seabed close to the beach, top heavy, almost upended by the pass-
ing waves. As I moved into deeper water, they ceded the ground to
masked crabs, the size and shape of bantam eggs, whose pincers, like
articulated forceps, were twice the length of their bodies. I watched
one stuffing a smashed shellfish into its mouth. Shore crabs in pie-crust
shells scuttled away as I loomed overhead.
The tide had been rising for an hour and a half. I swam towards the
horizon, feeling the cool green water push past my face. Creeping
over the sand in two fathoms of water was a pink grapefruit carapace.
I dived and swept it up in one movement, almost piercing my hands
on the spines. It was a female - I let her go again. She drifted back to
the seabed, paddling a little to keep her balance. I swam on and soon,
in deeper water, spotted a much larger beast. I hung above it, feeling
like a hawk about to swoop on its prey. When I had gorged on air, I
dived. I needed both hands to lever it out of the sand. It was another
male, the same size as the monster I had caught in Llansglodion.
I left it in a beach pool and swam out again, porpoising through the
water, thrilled by the cold draught of the sea and the beams of light
that searched the green deeps, glittering with motes of sand, drawn
from the shore until I could no longer see the seabed, then into the
emerald water beyond. I swam until my hands became so cold that I
could not close my fingers. Even then I was reluctant to leave. My skin
when I stepped out of the sea was white and riven.
I fished crabs on three more occasions that fortnight, while the wea-
ther held, and watched as their numbers rose until they piled against
the shore like autumn leaves. As they converged on the beach, I was
soon able to pick them up from the undersides of the rocks at the bot-
tom of the tide, without venturing into the water. Just beyond this
mark, in the dull yellow light behind the breaking waves, they loomed
through the wrack like armoured spaceships. Their flesh was sweet
and firm, cleaner than crayfish, more tender than lobster. A large crab
would feed three people. At the end of May, they disappeared as sud-
denly as they had arrived. Later in the summer their cast-off shells
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