This makes me think of a Star Trek Original Series episode- there was a mining operation and workers kept dying mysteriously, and stuff would be sabotaged. Enterprise crew comes and finds a creature clearly causing the issues and it communicates “no kill I”. (Meaning don’t kill me) Despite looking like nothing we knew, it was incredibly intelligent and had picked up some language. The reason it had been attacking? The miners were getting too close to the egg nursery of this endangered species.