crab-wise

Still prepared for instant flight, Moon-Watcher dropped from the face of the cliff and started to sidle towards Clindar, approaching him in a cautious, crab-wise manner.

Tin 2010

This crab-wise approach gets thrown in the pot along with a genuine sorrow at circumstance and weariness with the intellect's downgraded predicament; what's boiling over in this début is a humane love, and a love for humane acts, appropriate to our culturally frightened Present.

Archive 2009-04-01 Rus Bowden 2009

Now, once again Dawkins comes at this in a slightly crab-wise manner.

How Religion is Misunderstood 2007

He was doing it in his usual crab-wise fashion by moving step by step to bring the various contending factions within Damascus together.

CNN Transcript Jun 11, 2000 2000

Still prepared for instant flight, Moon-Watcher dropped from the face of the cliff and started to sidle towards Clindar, approaching him in a cautious, crab-wise manner.

The Lost Worlds of 2001 Clarke, Arthur C. 1972

'I'll get you a piece,' he said obligingly, and crawled crab-wise on his stomach over to where his colleagues were working.

Smokescreen Francis, Dick 1972

Sammy thumped stiff-legged past the burial mound, at the last moment turning slightly crab-wise against the hillside's slope and so giving him a perfect view of his quarry, deerstalker, field-glasses, open mouth and all.

The Alamut Ambush Price, Anthony 1971

From Gorgona the train returned crab-wise through Matachin and across the sand dyke that still holds the Chagres out of the "cut," and halted at Gamboa cabin.

Zone Policeman 88; a close range study of the Panama canal and its workers Harry Alverson Franck 1921

But on the _Fledgling_ went, climbing the waves insanely now, sometimes bow on, sometimes crab-wise -- but ever on.

Dan Merrithew Lawrence Perry 1914

Suffetula, but the cold, apart from their distance from the station, rendered this impossible; in order to reach the shed where luncheon was served, we were obliged to crawl backwards, crab-wise, to protect our faces from a storm which raised pebbles, the size of respectable peas, from the ground, and scattered them in a hail about us.

Fountains in the Sand Rambles Among the Oases of Tunisia Norman Douglas 1910