Although any shooter with the most remote interest in big game can tell you that Bell was famous for his use of extremely light-caliber rifles to kill the largest land animal with precision bullet placement, rather than employing the shoulder artillery of the British “elephant guns” favored by the heavy majority of professionals, those who have not read his scarce books know little of the personal side of this amazing man. His story and his achievements have left a mark on the entire field of big-game hunting which is very unlikely to fade. Certainly, so long as there are elephants and men willing to risk their lives in what Bell himself called “the real classic of all big-game hunting,” he will always be the standard against which others will be measured.
The second youngest of a family of ten children, Bell was born in Edinburgh twenty years short of the beginning of this century and orphaned at the age of six. Raised by older brothers whom he resented, Walter’s earliest dream was to become a hunter; at first in America, and soon thereafter, in Africa. Shipped off to school, he became almost completely unmanageable, quitting at the age of twelve, when he was apprenticed to a shipping line and sailed to Tasmania. Here he jumped ship, exercising his “highly developed technique of wandering,” and took work in a starch factory. Two years later, he was back in Scotland, only to be again sentenced to school, now in Germany. For two years he endured this, at last “escaping” down the Weser River to the sea in a homemade kayak. It foundered, forcing him to sell his beloved shotgun for passage across to Britain. Now sixteen, Bell again went home once more to beg his guardians to outfit him for his obsession of elephant hunting in Africa. The eight years of unrelenting nagging must have built up a cumulative effect on the family; to Bell’s disbelief, permission was granted. He was actually going to Africa!
Despite the fact that Bell’s brother was suffering from the classic Scottish syndrome of moths in the sporran, he at least provided second-class passage and a secondhand, single-shot Fraser rifle in .303 caliber. Along with a few clothes, some ammunition and precious little money, Bell took ship on a German freighter and passenger vessel for the fabled port of Mombasa, arriving there in 1897, not yet seventeen years old.
At that time, with the Uganda Railroad still far from completion, Mombasa was the jumping-off point for major caravans to the interior, usually under Arab or Swahili command. The trade circuit was to go inland with tobacco, beads, calico, wire and such, returning after an absence of what was often several years with ivory and, clandestinely, slaves. Because slaving was somewhat frowned upon by the Europeans, many captured men were circumcized and then “adopted” under the laws of Islam by their captors. Their “father” then put them to work or out to hire as obedient “sons,” although the actual practice was, nonetheless, slavery. It was to one of these caravans that Bell hoped to attach himself, shooting for meat and ivory in exchange for the protection of the expedition. Probably to his good luck, no such arrangement could be made. In those days, modern rifles such as Bell’s .303 were unappreciated by the muzzle-loader-armed slavers. Anyway, a white man anxious to join a trading caravan was looked on as the most obvious of spies. Bell’s white friends were particularly against his joining up, as they knew the workings of these “black ivory” outfits. Settling temporarily in a remote area, the caravan would team up with one tribe against another, adding the force of their several hundred muskets to their new allies’ spears in a bloodbath raid which would provide them with a good haul of human cargo. Anybody too young, old, ill or pregnant was put to the sword. It was a life no Britisher could brook, he was told emphatically. Disappointed, Bell looked elsewhere for a start.
A short time later, living frugally off his tiny capital, he ran into a man whom he had met on shipboard who turned out to be the chap in charge of supplies for the embryo railroad. According to this man, the company was hiring white guards. To date, the hospitality of the nyika had proved rather trying to the Indian surveying crews, who went off on their remote missions in imported American buckboard wagons drawn by mules from Cyprus, much to the delight of wild native bloods looking for a bit of spear practice. Lions, which may or may not have included the actual pair that became known as the infamous Man-eaters of Tsavo, had also killed several Indians and mules. The Indian mule skinners and surveyors went on strike, demanding that an armed white man accompany each party. To Bell, it was “a foresniff of Paradise.” He was immediately accepted for such a position upon it being determined that he had his own rifle and ammunition, and was ordered up the line to temporary headquarters at Voi.
For the young Bell, acting as bodyguard and meat hunter to a survey party in the deep bush must have been a slice of heaven, although he was shortly to discover that he had some serious equipment problems. The falling-block action of the Fraser rifle was of such design that when the .303 cartridge was fired in the chamber after it had been heated by the sun, the increased pressures caused thereby, due to the nature of the early cordite propellant (introduced for the .303 in 1892), made the empty case stick in the rifle and stubbornly refuse to be extracted. So not only was he hindered by having a single-shot rifle in the first place, but he could not reload without taking the time to punch out the empty case with a ramrod shoved through the barrel from the muzzle. It was a great handicap for a boy entrusted to keep his party safe from war parties and lions by means of his rifle, but in reality may have contributed considerably to his later great artistry with a rifle. Knowing he would have no chance for a second shot in a pinch, he learned to make the first one count at all costs, placing his initial bullet with great precision. This was to become his trademark.
Despite the beautiful lines and workmanship of the Fraser, Bell knew that its failure to extract might well lead to somebody getting killed—very likely himself. Meeting a Greek trader at a railroad camp one day, the two men examined each other’s rifle, the Greek falling in love with the classy little Fraser. It is not recorded whether Bell went so far as to point out the extraction problem of the .303, but a trade was effected, the Scot getting the Greek’s Winchester .450 black-powder, single-shot, falling-block rifle, an older gun but accurate, powerful and a good extractor. With the .450 came a good supply of cartridges of a type Bell had never tried, the hollow copper-point, or “capped,” Westley-Richards style. His experience with these bullets would greatly influence his ideas on hunting-bullet design and performance and, therefore, the preferences of unborn generations of riflemen.
Bell found the .450 bullets acceptable on light-skinned animals, such as antelope, but had great difficulty killing buffalo and rhino with them if bone was hit. Made to expand quickly, the bullets lacked penetration and stability, and were generally discontinued early in this century. This erratic performance of the hollow copper-points nearly got Bell lionized by the first big cat at which he ever fired.
One dawn, a bunch of his men came storming into camp with the news that a lion was drinking at a nearby waterhole. Bell grabbed the Winchester and went out immediately, in the company of an African carrying a “gas-pipe” muzzle-loading gun. Although it was the dry season and much grass had been burned off, there was still some left near water and also plenty of thick bush—excellent cover, if you happened to be a lion. As the two men approached, only thirty yards away they saw the lion’s head in some grass. There was a deep growl of warning. Instantly, Bell fired at the head, expecting to blow it off with his new gun and heavy bullet. To his consternation, the grass patch seemed to explode, but he saw nothing to permit a finishing shot. Then, before Bell could get off another round, the cat streaked into a nearby clump of dense bush and quieted down.
With applied wishful thinking, the African told Bell that the lion must be dead. Hoping that it would prove to be a brilliant observation, the man who would become “Karamojo” nonetheless thought that a quick look from a tree might be prudent before entering the bush. Balancing his rifle across some branches, he was in the act of hauling himself up, when, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a streak of tawny motion shortly
accompanied by a terrific roar. The lion was in full charge at him—his hands empty of the rifle, simba just two feet away. With incredible reflexes, Bell just had time to jerk his legs up and out of the way as the lion tore by beneath him. Turning on the African, who had started to run down the open slope, the lion gained rapidly. Bell dropped out of the tree with the rifle and drew a bead on the racing cat, but couldn’t shoot as the line of fire included the speeding figure of the terrified black. Just as the lion was about to pounce, the tribesman tripped and fell flat, the lion soaring over his body to land a few yards past. As he swung around to catch the man, Bell stuck another of the .450 slugs into the shoulder, distracting the feline but not even knocking it off its feet. The African wasted no time in dashing off at an angle and soon joined Bell back at the foot of the tree, sweating buckets but grinning broadly. Bell thought he’d never heard such a liar when the man calmly told him he often dodged lions with that trick.
The nameless African may have done little previous lion dodging, but he certainly seemed to have pluck. As the wounded cat had again gone into cover, the black returned to camp, recruited a team of enthusiastic beaters and assembled them near the bush where the lion was lying up. They were carrying everything from torches to bush knives, loaded with various noisemakers to drive the cat out. Bell confides that as they went fearlessly into that heavy stuff, knowing a wounded lion was in residence, he was himself scared stiff that somebody was about to get the chop. The performance of his rifle on the shoulder shot did little to bolster his confidence in the weapon, either. However, the last bullet had taken a lot of moxie out of the big cat, and, although he was no wilting lily when the beaters put him up at a couple of yards, the excited mob incredibly swarmed over him with clubs and knives so ferociously that Bell had difficulty in placing a finishing shot without hitting somebody.
When the Scot had a chance to look over the carcass, he found that the copper-point bullets had completely blown up on impact, causing minor flesh wounds called “cratering.” It had been damned good luck that the first head shot had broken the jaw, so that none of his men had been bitten. Combined with earlier experience with buffalo and rhino, Bell reached the conclusion (which I share with few reservations) that would guide the rest of his hunting career, although he had not yet seen his first elephant: A bullet that breaks up is worse than worthless. Penetration is what counts. A bullet that cannot reach the vitals it is aimed at, no matter what the intervening tissue and bone, not only does not kill quickly and reliably but vastly compounds the element of danger to the hunter. A wounded animal is ten times more likely to kill or injure the shooter than an unharmed one. The answer for dangerous game, especially thick-skinned, heavily boned species, is the “solid” bullet, precisely placed from a rifle of sufficient caliber to provide the power needed to penetrate, but not so heavy as to be awkward or overpowered.
For the nonhunter, a word of explanation is in order here. The great majority of both commercially produced rifle cartridges and those custom hand-loaded by shooters who demand specifications of finer tolerances than the mass-produced product, good though they are, are one form or another of the “expanding,” or soft-point, bullet types. There are as many individual styles of this type as there are brands of deodorants, but the concept of their ideal performance is, upon entering animal tissue, to expand, or “mushroom,” thus causing more damage in passage, up to the skin on the far side of the animal. The basis for this design and school of thought is the idea of so-called “hydrostatic shock,” the notion that since meat is more than 90 percent water, the kinetic energy, or “shocking power,” of the bullet—usually expressed in foot-pounds—will remain in the body, expending all its crushing theoretical knockdown power there.
At the risk of achieving literary overkill, permit a practical example of the invalidity of the topspin logic used by those shooters who worship at the shrine of massive foot-pounds and shocking power. Anybody who has ever shot an American woodchuck with one of the very high-velocity centerfire .22s, such as the .22-250, knows that a hit produces pretty violent damage. We won’t go through the figures, but the ratio between the foot-pounds of energy and the six-pound weight of the animal is a hefty 216—to—1. Under these circumstances, “hydrostatic shock” is, without any question, a valid concept. But see what happens when the same principle is applied to, for example, a 12,000-pound bull elephant. If he is tagged with a big slug from a .458 Winchester Magnum (which produces 4,050 foot-pounds at 100 yards from the muzzle), the ratio here is 1—to—3, which is saying that the elephant’s size gives him more than 600 times the resistance to each foot-pound of shock than the woodchuck has. Clearly, foot-pounds are of no more than theoretical worth under field conditions except on quite small game. Even on an animal as large as a white-tail deer there may be some value to “shock,” but in Africa, where things have a tendency to bite you, reliance on the effectiveness of foot-pounds is best confined to the ballistics tables.
The other side of the concept is shared today by most professional hunters and game officers I know. “Shock,” or impact, counts for little per se, whereas penetration in an undeviating line through obstructing tissue to a vital organ is paramount. Because soft-points, usually with a soft lead or alloy tip and a harder jacket covering the remainder of the bullet, are designed to change their shape and expand to a larger diameter, they also tend to act unpredictably in many cases, either “cratering” at high velocities (as Bell experienced), or otherwise rupturing—the separation of the core from the jacket—which may give unreliable performance.
The alternative is the “solid,” or full metal-jacket, bullet, which is created to do just one thing: penetrate to and through the organ at which it is directed. It should not “rivet” on the heaviest bone, lose stability or expand. Many hunters who have not used the solid decry it on the supposition that it “just whisks through game without doing any damage.” This is completely untrue, provided the shooter has a reasonable knowledge of his game’s anatomy. Because of its cohesiveness, the solid, upon contact with bone, is very deadly, sending shards of that bone through the body at high velocities. Of course the primary advantage of the solid remains that, if aimed properly, it will reach the heart, brain or spine with instantly fatal consequences.
This whole solid/soft-point business may seem to be overblown, but it is the key to Bell’s unmatched success and critical to his case. When Bell started hunting in Africa, and to a large degree even today, the accent was on the use of the heaviest possible rifle calibers for any dangerous game. Of course “heavy” is a relative term, but you’ll get the drift from Arthur H. Neumann, who hunted ivory professionally for three years, beginning in 1893. “I was never in favor of big bores … .” said Neumann. “I had been laughed at by many for starting on such a hunting trip with no larger rifle, but I was always an advocate of small bores.”
Small bores? Neumann used the ponderous and powerful .577 Nitro Express almost exclusively, this howitzer throwing a 750-grain bullet with over 7,000 foot-pounds of muzzle energy! To him and his fellows, this was a “small bore”! This double-barreled rifle weighed approximately sixteen pounds empty, an interesting comparison to Bell’s .256, which tipped in at five and a quarter pounds. Yet, by the standards of the time, it was a small bore in comparison to the 10-, 8-, and 4-gauges (.935 caliber) favored by older hands on the ivory trail. A 4-gauge would weigh thirty-five pounds and fired a four-ounce bullet. Hard to believe; even these guns were of mild and sweet disposition, viewed in the light of Sir Samuel Baker’s monster rifle called “Baby.” This brute was, in effect, a 2-gauge, firing a one half-pound explosive shell too big to be called a bullet! Despite its obvious effectiveness, Baker was none too fond of it, as the recoil did roughly as much damage to the unfortunate behind the stock as to the target.
It was in the face of this big-bore concept that Walter Bell formed his own ideas. On the logic that correct solid-bullet design and a good knowledge of game anatomy was the best combination of attribu
tes adding up to instant kills, Bell further deduced that, since precise placement of the shot was the key, the caliber size used shouldn’t matter, so long as it was powerful enough to penetrate deeply. It wasn’t the diameter of the bullet hole, but where it was located that mattered most. If a .303 solid, or, for that matter, a .275, or even the tiny .256 could reach the vital spots of a bull elephant, then why should a man carry an eighteen- or twenty-pound rifle around? The lighter guns were far faster, more comfortable, did not recoil nearly so much as the big bores. A man could also run a lot farther with a light rifle and not be out of breath when he got a chance for a shot. Of course, the shooting would have to be exact, but weren’t the advantages worth it?
It has been said, and correctly, I think, that Bell was indirectly responsible for the deaths of perhaps as many as one hundred men who tried to imitate him and his small-bore methods without the benefit of his skill or luck. Most of these hunters were killed by big game, usually wounded, which they could not stop or turn in a charge with their light rifles. To be effective, the light guns actually had to hit the brain or spine of an animal to cause instant death, having no “stopping power” to stun with a near miss passing close to a vulnerable organ. A big bullet such as the .600 Nitro Express or the .577 could knock an elephant—in full charge—cold with a central head shot that missed the brain. A .303 wouldn’t make him blink. They missed. Bell didn’t.
After the lion fiasco with the copper-capped bullets, Bell switched to a Lee-Metford, the newest British Army service rifle in .303 caliber, firing a round-nose, solid, nickel-jacketed slug weighing 215 grains. All the while he worked as a bodyguard and meat hunter for the railroad, he kept trying to make native contacts to put together a safari into the interior at last to hunt elephant, his finances being far inferior to the cost of mounting his own expedition. Unfortunately, the natives were all wary of any white, and he stayed with the railroad until Nairobi and beyond were reached, one day hearing that an explorer was coming up the line. An excited Bell met with the man, an English-speaking German headed for the undefined but elephant-crammed Uganda-Abyssinia (Ethiopia) border. The explorer was reputed to have unquestioned references, and local traders offered him almost unlimited credit. Applying to the man for a position as a hunter for the expedition, Bell was hired on the provision that he give a month’s notice to the railroad while the German crossed Lake Victoria to Entebbe, on the Uganda shore, where he would assemble the safari. The stranger seemed delighted to have the teenage wanderer, even saying that the ivory Bell would shoot would contribute nicely to help defray the costs of the expedition. Walter would be sent for in a month’s time, after the trip had been organized. Itchy, he counted off the days, resigned from the railroad and settled down to await the message summoning him to Entebbe and glory.
Death in the Silent Places Page 17