Paul Elmore, age 9, of Huntington Beach, Calif., for his question:

Why can't an elephant swim?

If you ask an elephant, he says Pooh: I can swim as well as anybody. And this is quite true. As a matter of fact the big fella is a very good swimmer. If he lives in the wild with a herd of relatives, often the whole group wishes to cross a stream. This is no problem at all. They simply wade into deep water and start swimming across. When their big feet can touch the bottom again, they wade ashore on the opposite side.

Elephants are very, very fond of water. In the wild, they like to spend hours by the brink of a river, where they wallow in the wet mud and squirt themselves with showers. Often they wade out into deep water and swim across. Sometimes they swim several miles down the middle of the stream and elephants have been known to swim across an arm of the sea. When they want to, they can keep swimming for several hours without stopping.