Who Has Come to Save You?

By Delaney Peterson

Behold!
The pale full moon
Rising on the breast of a warm summer’s night
Its light shines down from the heavens
Reflecting off of the grey-blue bay
Turning everything below a glinting silver

It beckons
With its soft, cold hand
It calls to a creature
Older than time itself
The waters, which lap oh so softly on the shore,
Soon break over massive domed shells

Answering the call of the pale moonlight,
A creature emerges
Its grey-brown exoskeleton gleams
In the light of the moon
It crawls slowly up the sandy beach,
Just outside of the waves’ gentle reach
And there it stills

Soon another, then another
Breaks free of the bay’s firm grasp
Smaller than the first,
They gather around the leader

As the smaller creatures satellite around the leader,
Quiet footsteps can be heard
Silent as the wind whispering through the reeds and sea grasses
Rapidly approaching

Bobbing headlamps are soon visible,
Illuminating the sandy shore and its inhabitants
Birds and sand crabs scamper away from the large feet
But the large creatures stay put,
For their proceedings are far too important to be frightened away from

Voices ring out over the formerly quiet beach
“Seven male horseshoe crabs, one female.”
The creatures, now known to be horseshoe crabs,
Ignore the strange beings;
The female too focused on laying her eggs,
And the males competing to fertilize them

In the mayhem of the fertilization,
One of the males is overturned
His telson waves around desperately,
Trying in vain to right himself
The beings, schoolchildren,
Notice his distress

One of them, a tall female,
Walks towards the flailing creature
She grabs either side of his shell,
And turns him over
As he scuttles back over to the egg-laying female,
The human girl whispers
“It is us, the humans, who have come to save you.
We shall repair what we have ruined.”

This child knows what her kind has done to the horseshoe crabs
How they have used the females for eel and conch bait
How they have encroached upon the shores with condos and hotels
Ruining their habitat

She knows how dependent humans are on their blue, copper-based blood
Its quick clotting abilities used to test the safety of life saving drugs
She also knows how this creature,
A living fossil,
Is important to the bay ecosystem
How their eggs feed many famished Red knots,
Who travel from the tip of South America to the Arctic

But there are some,
Like this girl and her group
Who care about the horseshoe crabs,
Who flip over the overturned,
Who conduct surveys to monitor their population
These are the individuals who have come,
Who have come to save the horseshoe crabs.