Rhinoceros Beetle Susan Hawthorne It was a public holiday on the day that he was born. His mother took this as a good omen. She failed to notice the reason for the holiday. The day he began school he took with him his pet: a rhinoceros beetle. Over an extended period he had a series of beetles which accompanied him. Each day his little wooden box went with him and each day a rhinoceros beetle was inside the box. His teachers thought him somewhat odd because he knew so much about some things, and so little about others. But the little girls knew otherwise. The teachers always called on him during Nature Study to explain the life cycle of butterflies, grasshoppers, liver flukes or beetles. He would get carried away by his task and enter every detail—his eyes burning ferociously. The town he lived near was home to two milk bars, two hotels and on the other side of the street were the railway station and a sugar-cane mill. It was one of those towns that have a river for three months of the year and a bridge built to sustain the big floods every fifteen years. The boy lived beyond the town's borders and grew up without companionship, aside from the ubiquitous rhinoceros beetles and a range of other insects, reptiles, stuffed birds and a cat that refused to be held in his arms. The garden being more than large enough to swing a cat, he had done precisely that. In the spring he added to his large collection of eggs; raiding nests and blowing out the yolks; or he netted butterflies, pinning them stretched out, covering the boxes later with a non-reflective glass. In the wet, when the grasshopper plagues descended, he would spend hours removing their legs, attempting to outdo his previous day's record. In the years when grasshoppers were relatively few, he found other creatures to entertain him or made do with his rhinoceros beetles. In the dry of the winter he would ambush frogs and those little lizards that dispense with their tails when grabbed. Each season provided him…
