Rhino by Author Paul Carter MD

by Author Paul Carter MD

 

I am not sure how it first came about, but even from a very early age, my younger daughter has been a rhinophile. Perhaps we put a stuffed rhino in her cot for her to cuddle up to as a new-born, but I really can’t remember. What I do remember, however, is that by the age of three or four, when we went to tuck her up at night, we would find her squeezed into the very edge of her bed with an entire row of endangered horned animals peacefully settling down for the night across her pillow. She even had a copy of Albrecht Durer’s rhino on her bedroom wall.

One year, when she was about eight or so, we asked her what she would like for Christmas and she said she would like a rhino. A big one. One that she could sit on. 

She quite liked the rocking horse we got her instead, but she didn’t give up on her sitting-rhino idea and over the following few months she pestered me about it often. And the more she pestered, the more the idea took hold of me too, until I eventually went out and bought some wide planks of radiata, and glued and clamped them together as a block and put them at the back of the workshop to let them set.

‘That doesn’t look much like a rhino,’ she said when she saw what I had done, and I had to explain that I hadn’t started carving it yet.

Fortunately, the actual carving wasn’t as difficult as I imagined it would be. I studied lots of pictures of rhinos, decided exactly what I wanted to create, drew it carefully on all sides of the block, drilled guide holes to get the shapes and angles right, and then set to work with a set of chisels and a mallet.

And just for once, I didn’t tackle the project like my usual bull at a gate, instead of taking it nice and slowly and finding it all quite meditative. Apart from getting into trouble for constantly walking woodchips through from the workshop into the house, the job went really well. One of the back legs is a touch thinner than its opposite number, and I am not going to tell you which one, as perhaps I am the only one who can see it, but I’m glad to relate that I didn’t make any catastrophic blunders. I never had to glue any emergency pieces of pine into any accidental over carving either.

I put hundreds of hours into that rhino, which wasn’t easy, what with also having a farm and a surgery to look after, as well as a life to live. Thinking about the whole project could easily have overwhelmed me, so I steadily and carefully chipped away, just doing the journey one step at a time. I didn’t do it all in one hit, of course, and there were periods where very little happened at all, but I am pleased to announce that I did finally manage to get the job completed and that I am happy with the final result. 

But that was only last week, and my daughter is now forty-six. She did sit on the rhino when I showed it to her, but I think her professed thrill at doing so was probably more for my benefit than out of genuine personal excitement.

So there it is. The rhino has been thirty-eight years in the making, and I don’t feel in the slightest bit bad about that because it took Leonardo not far short of that to come up with the Mona Lisa.