Elmer saves himself from the rhinoceros with toothpaste

Elmer saves himself from the rhinoceros with toothpaste by turning a threat of drowning into an opportunity to help his attacker. Thirsty and stopping at a jungle pool, Elmer is seized by the seat of his pants and learns that the pool belongs to a Rhinoceros who is ready to kill trespassers. The animal’s distress over its yellow-gray tusk gives Elmer a way to redirect its attention: toothpaste and a toothbrush make the threatened victim useful, then leave the Rhinoceros absorbed in polishing while danger closes in from another direction.

The encounter at the pool

Elmer reaches the pool while following the trail through the jungle. He is very thirsty, and, still wearing his rubber boots, wades into the water and bends to drink. Something sharp catches him by the seat of his pants and shakes him. Suspended over the pool, unable to see the speaker, Elmer has entered a place whose significance he did not know: it is the Rhinoceros’s private weeping pool.

The animal explains that it drowns anyone it finds using the pool. Its threat is immediate, and the physical hold makes Elmer’s danger more than a warning. When Elmer apologizes, the Rhinoceros does not relent. Instead, it tosses him up and down over the water while explaining why it weeps. The pool is private not because everyone has one, but because the Rhinoceros believes it has a particularly compelling reason to grieve.

The Rhinoceros’s grievance

The source of that grief is the color of the Rhinoceros’s tusk. It recalls that, when young, its tusk was pearly white; in old age, it has become an ugly yellow-gray. The Rhinoceros says that it considers everything else about itself ugly too, but once the tusk was beautiful, it had not worried so much about the rest. Now that the tusk seems ugly as well, the animal says it cannot sleep at night and weeps all the time. Its account makes the pool’s name and the threat connected to it part of the same grievance: the Rhinoceros’s persistent sorrow has become a rule it enforces against anyone who comes to drink.

Elmer listens while being held above the water and thinks over the things in his pack. The contrast between his helpless position and his practical inventory of supplies shapes the turn in the encounter. He does not try to overpower the Rhinoceros or argue it out of its sorrow. Instead, he offers something directed at the very feature the animal has identified as the cause of its distress: he says he has things that can make the tusk white and beautiful again, and asks to be put down so he can give them to the Rhinoceros.

Toothpaste as a diversion

The offer changes the Rhinoceros’s behavior at once. Excited and almost unable to believe Elmer, it puts him down and dances in a circle while he takes out a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush. The change is consequential: the animal that had been holding Elmer over the pool and threatening to drown him now cooperates because it hopes its tusk can be restored. Elmer’s supplies, carried for his journey, become tools for escaping this particular danger.

Elmer asks the Rhinoceros to bring its tusk nearer. He wets the brush in the pool, squeezes on a dab of toothpaste, and scrubs hard at one tiny spot. He then has the Rhinoceros wash the tusk off and wait until the pool is calm enough to look into. In the dim jungle light, the test is difficult to see, but the small cleaned spot shines pearly white, like new. That visible result persuades the Rhinoceros more effectively than Elmer’s promise alone: delighted by the change, it takes the brush and begins scrubbing violently for itself.

Interruption and significance

The Rhinoceros’s absorption gives Elmer a brief reprieve, but the encounter does not unfold in isolation. A boar returns from the big clearing where the tigers are chewing gum. Elmer hears hoofsteps and jumps behind the Rhinoceros. The boar sees the animal brushing and notices the toothbrush and toothpaste, then asks where they came from. The Rhinoceros is too busy to answer. Thus the grooming that draws the Rhinoceros’s attention away from Elmer also supplies a visible, unexplained spectacle that catches the boar’s attention as well.

The scene’s reversal depends on a precise combination of observation and timing. The Rhinoceros’s threat rests on its control of the pool and its physical hold on Elmer; its fixation on the discolored tusk creates an opening Elmer can use without confronting that strength directly. The toothbrush does not defeat the animal or resolve the deeper belief that everything about it is ugly. It changes what the Rhinoceros is doing long enough for Elmer to cease being the center of its attention, and the returning boar further interrupts the moment. The escape is therefore an improvised diversion built from the exact grievance the Rhinoceros has disclosed, rather than a contest of force.