He was still waiting weeks later, nearly broke and without any place to stay. Whereas the company had been feeding and housing him, now that he had quit he was on his own. In desperation, Bell made a deal with a native village on the lake shore, near Port Florence (Kisumu), getting the use of a hut and food in exchange for killing hippo for them. Bell says that the hut and the people, complete nudists, were clean, but the native fare was drab and tiresome. At night, mosquitoes swarmed the village, only kept down by ferocious clouds of smoke which made life as uncomfortable as the insects themselves did. With very little quinine to start with, malaria began to ravage the Scot, but he stuck to the village, awaiting the summons from across the lake. At last, word filtered over the water. The expedition had departed some time ago without any notification to Bell. Crushed with disappointment, with hardly a penny and burning with fever, he was defeated, at least for this round. Without sufficient capital, he would be forced to return to Scotland to try to pry some more funds out of his brother for a proper ivory safari. Traveling steerage back to Britain, he took heart that at least now he had some practical African experience. There were still elephants, and he knew roughly where to find them. He would be back.
Bell didn’t know it when he left, but it would be close to three years before he would return to his destiny of Africa. Again denied the money to outfit himself properly, he got stale news of the Alaskan Klondike gold rush and decided to give it a go. With a .360 Fraser and 160 cartridges, he caught a steamer for Canada and then a train cross-country in the company of a fellow highlander named Mickey, a huge man with a gentle disposition. Mickey had been sent for by his brother, who had a paying claim in the Klondike. When Mickey suggested that the rifleman join him in working for the brother, Bell accepted, the pair paddling down the Yukon River and hiking overland to the claim. During the whole trip downriver, not a head of game was to be seen, the demand for food, particularly meat, having driven all the moose and caribou far from any area of human activity.
At the claim site, Bell was welcomed and paid ten dollars a day to work in the “placer” mining operation. With the thick permafrost, every grain of gold-bearing dirt had to be melted free before being washed for its yellow treasure, a task requiring the tedious heating of rocks in fires to melt the frozen soil, which was then shoveled into boxes and hoisted to the surface by muscle power. Despite the good pay, Bell rapidly decided that he was a shooter, not a shoveler. His thoughts shifted to the food shortage and the potential profit in meat hunting. At two dollars per pound when rarely available, it seemed a lucrative project, provided that he could find some way to freight the meat from the remote game areas back to Dawson.
Leaving the placer mine, Bell went to Dawson and formed a very casual partnership with a dog-sled-and-team owner who, as was the custom of the gold camps, used only his first name, Bill. The two men found a good hunting area in the mountains some 200 miles from Dawson and got there before the freeze. The arrangement was that Bell would do the hunting and prepare the carcasses, while Bill freighted the meat back to Dawson on the dog sled. Killing a grizzly bear and two moose one day, they let the meat freeze solid and built a large hut nearby. As the larder was growing toward the first shipment, Bell learned much American bushcraft from his partner, including how to make and use snowshoes. As he carried on hunting, Bell also found reinforcement for his precision-bullet-placement theory. With only 103 rounds left for the all-important and modestly powered .360, each shot had to count. And so it did. With Bill off with the first load of meat, leaving the youngster alone for twenty-seven days, the meat continued to pile up, although much was lost to wolves because Bell had only two dogs to help him drag back the manageable pieces to the hut. Delighted by the size of the stockpile on his return, partner Bill made ready to sled another load back, claiming to have deposited the proceeds of the first in a bank, having gotten a dollar seventy-five a pound for the whole works, including the bones.
The partnership went on until early spring, Bell even killing moose with Bill’s borrowed Colt single-action revolver, a .45 caliber seven and a half-inch barreled “big iron” sixshooter, by chasing them into deep snow and brain-shooting them from close range. A trusting soul despite his experience with the “explorer,” Bell never insisted on a division or accounting of the money that was supposed to be piling up back at the Dawson bank. Nor was he suspicious when, leaving one day with another sled of meat, Bill asked for the return of the Colt on the grounds that the wolves were becoming very bold on the trail. Taking an extralarge cargo of frozen meat which he said he could sell to some new claims on the way to Dawson, Bill mushed his huskies and was gone. For good.
Bell stuck around, continuing to hunt until the spring thaw began to spoil his stockpile, worrying more and more as Bill became increasingly overdue. At last, with three dogs, Bell hiked the 200 miles back to Dawson, hearing no word of Bill from any claim he passed. Of course, it was the same story when he got to town; nobody could tell him of the whereabouts of this particular “Bill,” the confusion compounded with the fact that Bell didn’t even know the man’s last name! He had completely conned the Scottish kid and disappeared without a trace. Whatever the case, Bell was back in the old spot of being stranded in the middle of East Nowhere with nothing to show for a lot of hard work. Fortunately, a handy little war came along that bailed him out. To put the frosting on his salvation, it was even in Africa!
Arriving at the recruiting office in Calgary, having sold his rifle for passage through Nome and the Aleutian Islands, Bell found 5,000 men competing for the quota of just 500 recruits to go to South Africa to fight the Boers. Nobody had much of an idea who these Boers might be, or what the war was all about, and cared less. The lure of travel and adventure was irresistible for most of the motley crew trying to join the Canadian Mounted Rifles, a rowdy crowd of hunters, trappers, cowboys and backwoodsmen of indeterminate profession. Although the competition was fierce, Bell shot a perfect score and passed his physical exam to be accepted, then spent what he had left—forty dollars—on a horse which the government would immediately buy back from him for his use.
Bell’s participation in the Boer War is quite fuzzy, mostly left blank by him in his later writings. Of the conduct of the campaigns, he calls them merely a series of marches that killed a lot of horses, climaxed with distant and largely ineffective exchanges of rifle fire with the enemy. In one instance, though, a chance bullet killed his horse from under him, and, caught in the open, he was taken prisoner. The Boers couldn’t make head or tail out of why a “colonial” Scot would be fighting on the English side and, on the presumption that he was young and misguided, treated him well. One night, instead of going to the wagon where he and a fellow prisoner were supposed to sleep, the two ducked into a stand of corn and escaped to the British command with little trouble. With the assumption that the two ex-prisoners had gained a personal knowledge of the enemy and his ways during their captivity, they were both posted as scouts to headquarters.
Eventually, and without further comment from Bell, the war was over, and he managed to take discharge and shipment back to Britain. Since he had left school, he had been a sailor, a bodyguard and meat hunter on two continents, a miner, a laborer in Tasmania and a front-line soldier and scout. But now, after fifteen years of frustration, he could at last do what he had dreamed of. At twenty-one Bell had come into his inheritance and immediately commenced outfitting for his third trip to Africa. He was going to be a professional ivory hunter. He had made it!
Although to this date (1901) Bell had not yet seen his first elephant in the wild, his selection of weapons for the coming venture remained in line with his experiences. His friendship with the master gunsmith of Edinburgh, Daniel Fraser, gave him plenty of exposure to try the heavy doubles; from the beating he took in testing them from the bench, entirely too much exposure. As Bell observed, the gunmakers’ catalogs of this period were “marvellous” and exciting publications, carefully designed and illustrated, not to quite frigh
ten a sportsman into canceling his shooting trip to Africa or India, but to convince him that he would be placing himself in mortal peril without the immense shocking power of the firm’s fine double-express rifles at his disposal. The laws of physics being no different in 1901 than they are now, little mention was made of the fact that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If tons of bullet energy were blasting from the muzzles of these shoulder cannons, then there was a likewise brain-rattling recoil slammed into the shoulder of the shooter. Bell would stick with a pair of sporter .303s converted from military rifles, each with ten-shot clips. He doesn’t specifically mention purchasing it from Fraser, but Bell also bought a mean little Mauser pistol with a detachable shoulder stock that, in effect, turned it into a semiautomatic carbine. It wasn’t meant for elephants but turned out to be mighty handy in some circumstances.
The “Lunatic Line” having snaked its bloody way to the end of the line at Kisumu on Lake Victoria by now, Bell rode the train through his old haunts until reaching the lake. Undecided where to mount his first trip, he determined to scout around a bit. Based on the advice of a steamer-captain friend, Uganda seemed a good area to try, and he proceeded to Entebbe, where the explorer had left from so long ago. Near here, he had a chance to try the .303s with their solid bullets, killing a buffalo with a single shot, which broke the hip and raked all the way through the bull’s rear to his front, to catch the chest vitals. For sure, no penetration problems here!
Pushing farther up-country in search of elephant, heading for and reaching Unyoro (more commonly known as Bunyoro), Bell found the area reputed to have large and fine ivory. There was a problem even then of considerable crop damage to the native shambas, or cultivation areas, by raiding jumbo, and the local people were extremely well disposed toward anybody who professed to want to kill elephants. Not only would the locals get the meat, but shooting would also drive the herds away from their crops. Before Bell could begin hunting, however, he came down with a rousing dose of dysentery and was forced to call upon a man named Ormsby to whom he had a letter of introduction from a mutual pal in Entebbe.
Something of a character, Ormsby took Bell in and cured him with quinine and liberal draughts of Epsom salts. In spite of not being a hunter himself (Ormsby was involved in gunrunning with an ex-missionary named Stokes, who was later hanged by the Belgians), nevertheless he had been in the Unyoro region long enough to confirm to Bell that elephant were all over the place, their ivory long, heavy and of the most valuable “soft” texture. A price would have to be paid for them, however, as this was the rainy season, and the whole country was smothered in high grass. It would be hard, miserable going, but at least the large native population would not be underfoot, as the rains confined their activities to the villages. Using Ormsby’s place as headquarters, Bell started off on his first elephant hunt.
One point that Bell’s detractors frequently make is that many of the elephant he killed were unsophisticated and found right out in the open, particularly in Uganda. This is true and unquestionably did give him an edge; modern hunting is generally in heavy cover, making it much harder. On the other hand, these elephants had to be handled as perfectly in the stalk and kill as any others today, or the sounds of a dying tusker would invariably panic the survivors and any other elephants in hearing. For example, consider the first elephants Bell ever saw … .
Eight big bulls were lounging around a mud hole, quite a sight even for the time. Today, a pair of shootable bulls found together would be a rarity. As Bell made his approach, he remembered what a soldier from a nearby garrison had told him of the soldier’s own great experience with the brain shot, having claimed to have killed two with this method. According to the man, the brain was located very high up in the top of the skull where, as Bell put it, “a man would have a bowler hat three sizes too small for him.” Secure in the reliability of this piece of intelligence, Bell attacked the eight elephants, blazing away at the tops of their heads. After six “perfectly” placed bullets to this region, he began to wonder if the soldier had shot a couple of elephants with freak brain placements, as it was for damned sure that wasn’t where these tuskers carried their brains. So ineffectual were the tiny bullets through the spongy, honeycomb bone of the top of the head that, although they moved off, the animals were absolutely unconcerned with the wounds. Catching up with several of the bulls, Bell was amazed to see that they had even returned to feeding as they ambled along.
When one stopped at a small puddle to squirt water over his back, Bell shot him with the little .303 just behind the shoulder, where he thought the heart should be. This, at least, brought a reaction from the tusker—and what a reaction! He instantly bolted away at top speed, trumpeting and roaring, then stopped and staggered, falling to the ground. His dying sounds electrified the rest of the bulls and probably every other elephant within earshot, clearing the whole area before Bell could get away another shot. He would never forget the effect of the sounds and swore to himself to learn the brain shot or die trying (which was a distinct possibility with such light rifles).
The next thing, he thought, smoking by the carcass of his first bull, was to find out for a fact the brain’s location. But how? Leaving a couple of men, he hiked off back to Ormsby’s and got a long, two-man logging saw. Having had his men skin the skull and remove it from the body, he had it cut exactly in two on a line between the tusks, down from front to back, no easy job in the damp heat and growing swarms of flies. Of course, the brain was nowhere near where the soldier had said it was, being in the center, rear portion of the skull, just forward of and slightly higher than the ear holes, depending, of course, upon the relative position of the animal’s head in life. With his sketchbook, Bell—who was later to have one of his amateur paintings hung by the Royal Academy—drew careful “before” and “after” pictures of the anatomy. At last he really knew where to aim, starting his career of becoming probably the finest technician of brain shooting elephant who ever lived. True, some other hunters employed a brain shot sometimes, but it was literally a hit-or-miss proposition. Bell even learned to hit the brain from a rear angle, drilling his long, slender little bullets through the massive neck muscles and the back of the head. No one else I have ever heard of, even in modern times, has mastered this almost impossible angle.
In this particular bull, his first, the brain measured twelve inches by six inches, and the tusks scaled a fine eighty-one and seventy-eight pounds. As Bell does not mention any one elephant being especially better toothed than the others, we can presume that the bachelor herd may have represented as much as 1,200 or more pounds of ivory.
Over the following months in Unyoro, Bell began to perfect his hunting style as he gained more and more practical experience. The day after bisecting the elephant’s skull, he applied what he had learned and killed several more tuskers with perfect brain shots, and was well on his way to the perfection of that art. Still, there was a lot more to successful commercial ivory hunting than that.
The next trick that he had to learn was the art of shooting elephants in a group without having the entire herd scatter in fear. Even with the instant death brought by a brain shot, should a falling bull bump into another, the whole group will panic. For whatever reason, possibly because they think it is a thunderclap, elephants do not necessarily take alarm at the close sound of a rifle shot if the brained animal just rolls over or falls into the kneeling position, remaining balanced, the head swinging from side to side on the big, elastic neck muscles. This phenomenon was common when I was conducting hunting safaris in Zambia and Botswana. After a careful stalk resulting in the death of the best tusker with a brain shot, the accompanying animals would normally ignore the old boy, figuring he had just decided to have a snooze. We would retreat carefully until the remaining elephants naturally drifted away rather than try to scare them off and risk a charge. Bell, of course, would regularly knock them off, one by one.
Although famous for his brain shooting, Bell was by
no means against the application of the heart shot, particularly on lone bulls or those already disturbed. He preferred to place his small bullets into the thick network of arteries just over the heart, where even the diminutive .256 was a sure killer. The arteries are more vulnerable to the tiny hole left by the small bore than the massive heart itself; the great Jim Sutherland once reported that he had shot an elephant through the heart with a .303, only to have the bull travel more than a mile and live twelve hours! The problem, I believe, lies in the springy heart muscle itself, which tends to seal up the bullet hole, keeping leaking to a minimum.
Curiously, Bell later somewhat modified the position he had always maintained as the most effective way to kill animals other than elephant. Whereas he unequivocably stated in earlier works that the solid was the most deadly missile, even on light-skinned game such as lion—of which he killed sixteen alone with the .256 and .275 using solid bullets, all one-shot kills—he wrote, towards the end of his life in the early 1950s, that the neck shot was equally effective with the soft-point bullet at high velocities, perhaps even more so. His logic in singling out the neck as the only vital area close to the skin’s surface is irrefutable. Yet any student of this great hunter must question Bell’s own African experience in this area.
Death in the Silent Places Page 18