t know he was there. She
showed black dots bobbing upon silver lanes, which were sea-duck of
various kinds--scaup, long tail, scoter, and the rest. She showed a
line of old, rotten posts, broken off short by the waves, along a
sand-ridge, which were wild-geese; and she showed three big, white
swans--wild-swans, wilder even than the geese--floating like ghosts in
the enchanted light.

But she also showed other things, indistinctly, 'tis true; but
enough--quite enough. She revealed for an instant, as she shone on the
spot on the sand where the skua had sat, the fact that the sand seemed
to be alive, horribly alive, as if the pebbles had taken legs and ran
about. It was a sudden, ghastly flashlight, hidden as soon as seen,
and it gave one the shudders. Those pebbles were crabs mad with
hunger, as crabs always seem to he.

They had arrived there as if by magic--been creeping in ever since
dusk, probably (one of the things that were unseen); but whether blood,
or feathers, or taint of blood, or what horrible, ghoulish system of
espionage drew them, is not for me to say. They were there, anyway,
and--and--well, and then they were not there. The next flashlight of
the moon showed that some others had taken their place. This was
ghastly, for the others were bigger than any shore crabs, and they
hopped, and they sat up hunched, like hobgoblins, and--they scratched!
This last identified them, for the soulless, shelled crab-people are
not given to scratch much--at least, not in _that_ way. They were
rats--shore rats. The last designation is necessary, for there are
rats _and_ rats, all bad, but the shore rat is the worst. How many
sleeping birds, wounded, tired, or unalert, die at his hands, or,
rather, his teeth, in the course of a year would amaze anybody if
known, and the shell-fish he relieves of life are legion.

The hard, horny carapace of a retreating crab scraped, in the dead
silence, against the rock-bowlder on which the skua sat. He made no
move at the sound, the suggestive sound; but his feathers were shut
down quite tight, and he looked far smaller than usual. When birds
shut down their feathers in that fashion they put on an armor coat, as
it were, through which very little can pierce. It showed that he was
ready.

And you think that the mere shore crabs could be nothing to him. But a
few hundred ravening shore crabs, with their lives for sale--all
digging pieces out of you in the dark--are not so