There is a certain way to pick up a crab in your hand so he cannot pinch you, and Bunny and his chums, being “salt water boys,” knew how to do this.
Charlie first put one foot lightly on the crab, hard enough to hold the crawling creature from moving, but not hard enough to crush the upper shell, with its sharp, sticking points. Charlie then reached down and took hold, between his thumb and one finger, of one of the hind “flippers” or swimming legs of the crab, close to where it joined the shell. Held thus, the crab could not reach around with its one remaining claw to pinch Charlie. The boy lifted the crab from under his shoe and tossed the squirming creature into the basket with the other crabs.
“Can you get the claw off Patter’s leg?” asked George of Bunny.
“Yes, I got it off,” was the answer. “But it was stuck pretty tight.”
Even after a crab’s claw is torn from its body the claw will still cling, for it has sharp points that lock like a spring trap.
Patter stopped howling and began to lick his slightly injured paw. Bunny watched his pet trick dog anxiously.
“I hope he won’t be lame,” he said. “If he’s lame he can’t do his tricks so well.”
Patter limped a little when he put his pinched paw down on the ground, but this soon wore off and a little later he was romping around as if nothing had happened.
But the next time one of the crabs got out of the net and began to scramble around on the ground, Patter took care to be far away. He barked and whined at the crab, but he did not put a paw near it. He had learned a lesson.
“Well, we have enough crabs,” said Charlie, after a while.