There were two factors that contributed most directly to Bell’s great accomplishments: his physical fitness and his superb mastery of the rifle. His body conditioning does not warrant further comment, other than to observe that anybody who walks 60,000 miles is likely to be in pretty fair shape. As far as his shooting is concerned, just how good he was is worth a couple of examples. One incident took place back in Karamojo … .
After leaving Mani-Mani, Bell marched to Bukora, an especially restless country where he was not known. Shortly after his arrival, a stream of Karamojong started trickling into his camp, which aroused the suspicion of his Swahili headman. The Swahili noticed a bad sign; there were no women in sight and he drew Bell’s attention to the fact that each small group of warriors had nonchalantly picked out one of the safari, keeping in spear range wherever the target went. Clearly, on a given signal, the Karamojong would start spearing everybody to death.
Trying to think of a way to impress the Karamojong, Bell walked out of camp, announcing that he was going to kill meat. A few hundred yards away, he saw a herd of zebra running across his front at a full gallop. Up came the .303, and as fast as he could work the bolt action, he killed ten with ten shots, one right after another. The Karamojongs were dumbfounded, their eyes as wide as dinner plates.
Even to the nonhunter, the rapid-fire shooting of ten running zebras without a miss will sound like a fair example of marksmanship, but to the experienced African hand it’s nothing short of a miracle! The zebra is one of the toughest of all “plains” game and impossible to kill instantly, unless hit exactly right. To knock off ten in a row, firing as fast as possible, is a feat I doubt one man in 10,000 could pull off. But then, Bell was one in several million.
Bell’s muscle conditioning was almost a religion, especially in the training of those muscles used in holding the rifle. He nearly always had a gun in his hands, and constantly practiced aiming and holding it in different positions until it was almost part of him. Not only was he able to mount and fire his rifle quickly and accurately, but through long familiarity he developed a subconscious sense of aiming that produced what he called “automatic accuracy.” It was his claim that, just as the rifle fired after being carefully aimed, the subconscious part of his brain took over and made an automatic correction of the barrel that invariably put the bullet dead on target. It sounds rather like a personal brand of Zen Buddhism, or perhaps today it would just be called confidence. Whatever, it sure worked for Bell.
Karamojo Bell was no chest thumper in his writings, usually going to pains to point out his poorer performances, rather than to emphasize his accomplishments. Yet he did pen a passage that gives an idea of how truly gifted he was with the rifle. Speaking of his personal preference for open-aperture rear sights, Bell tells of having the pleasant problem of shooting up some 6,000 rounds of .318 ammunition which had proved unreliable by misfiring about 30 percent of the time. He was at Jinja, where Lake Victoria forms a falls by pouring over a rock ledge, a place which hundreds of cormorants passed over on their way to roost each evening. They were high and fast, some 300 feet above the ground, which is nearly twice the effective range of a modern 12-gauge shotgun. Bell took to amusing himself here some evenings, shooting at the flying fish eaters with his elephant rifle, just to get rid of the bum cartridges. At one time, his average on these nearly impossible targets was 80 percent and his overall hits about six out of ten! Consider a target a foot long and half as high without feathers, traveling at forty to fifty miles per hour a hundred yards or more away, and you will appreciate the timing and “lead” calculation to hit it more than half the time, shooting offhand with open sights!
One of these evenings, Bell was shooting unusually well, and a pair of Goanese clerks from the town came over and asked to look at his “shotgun,” as it was far superior to theirs, being able to kill at such distances. I would have loved to have seen their faces when they discovered it was a rifle!
After the Great War, Bell was laid up for a good while with a combination of malaria and African complications. And speaking of complications for an elephant hunter, he had gotten married. But his heart was still on the ivory trail, and he returned to hunt the Ivory Coast, the Niger and Benue rivers, this time traveling mostly by canoe with his safari and Wynne Eyton. Covering more than 3,000 miles, all the way up the Bahr Aouck, a good deal of ivory was taken. This journey probably aggregated more than 8,000 miles from the west coast until return.
Returning home to his wife, he stayed for several years, content with his memories now that he was well into his forties. His last visit to Africa was not to hunt ivory, but a mechanized affair in the company of American friends using automobiles. Bell had planned to return for a last ivory hunt in 1939, he told Bruce Kinloch, chief game warden of Uganda, during Kinloch’s visit to Bell’s home about 1951, but the war canceled the trip.
After his motorized journey, Bell settled down for good at an estate near Garve in Ross-shire, the Scottish highlands, calling the home Corriemoillie. Here Bell did his first writing, submitting a piece to the prestigious Country Life magazine, which clamored for more. His articles for this magazine were later collected in book form and published in 1923 by the magazine under the title The Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter. It became one of the great classics of elephant hunting and was followed much later by Karamojo Safari, which was shorter and dealt more specifically with the Karamojo region of Uganda. His life story, which incorporated much material from his first book, was assembled after Bell’s death by Whelan under the title Bell of Africa.
Bell continued his interest in sailing in his later years, eventually building a yacht named for Richard Lion-Heart’s Trenchemere. He does not presume to give us her length, but she was a steel-hulled beauty with a mast which towered a colossal eighty-five feet from the deck. The yacht became a second home for Bell and his wife Katie, who raced and sailed her up until World War II broke out and the Trenchemere was requisitioned for government war service. She was never used, as it turned out, spending the war years in a fresh-water lock in the Caledonian Canal.
Bell got his yacht back in 1946 and sailed her extensively the next two summers. Despite a mild heart attack in 1948, he continued to cruise her but in 1950 was forced by failing health to sell Trenchemere. Somewhat over a year later, still hunting deer and rabbits near home whenever he could, fate closed the door on him. Another heart attack in 1951 proved to be the last of Walter Dalrymple Maitland “Karamojo” Bell. The man was dead; the legend lives on.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bell, W. D. M. The Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter. London: Country Life, 1923.
————. Karamojo Safari. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949.
————. Bell of Africa. London: Neville Spearman and The Holland Press, 1960.
Bulpin, T. V. The Hunter Is Death. Cape Town: Books of Africa, 1968.
Capstick, Peter Hathaway. Death in the Long Grass. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977.
Foran, Major W. Robert. Kill: Or Be Killed. London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., 1933.
Kinloch, Bruce. The Shamba Raiders. London: Collins and Harville Press, 1972.
Neumann, Arthur H. Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa. London: Rowland Ward Ltd., 1898.
Taylor, John. Pondoro, Last of the Ivory Hunters. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1955.
Colonel Edward James Corbett
THE GIRL’S LEG, still warm to the touch, lay on the sun-dappled trail, blood gently oozing from just below the knee where it had been severed as though by the stroke of a sword. At the edge of a small pool a few yards away, red splintered bone and great gouts of gore stained the jungled floor of the mountainous Indian watercourse, seeping into the splayed pug marks of a tigress, a man-eating tigress who now heard a small sound from the ravine from which she had carried the girl’s body in order to eat it. Swiftly and firmly, the striped cat gripped the fresh corpse with long fangs, effortlessly bounding up and over a fifteen-foot-high bank, carrying the body f
or several more yards. Tucking the half-eaten girl under an overhanging rock past a thick stand of hill shrubbery, the tigress turned back, flattening herself low in the brush, inching up to the edge of the bank overlooking the pool. Silent as a shadow, her only motion the uncontrolled twitch of her hidden tail, she watched through the cover as a man-thing stepped slowly into view. The steel muscles of her hind legs bunched in anticipation, curved talons gripping the earth for a spring onto the hunter below.
Jim Corbett had been following for nearly a mile, carefully tracking from the coagulating pool of blood and broken blue beads that marked the place of the kill. He was alone, the hillman who had started with him on the blood trail now perching in petrified terror back up the mountain on the highest rock he could find. Corbett stopped at the bloodstains and carefully glanced all about him, unmindful of the hard eyes that watched him just out of range. Cautiously, he stepped forward, fascinated by the youthful severed leg at the water’s edge, his eyes downcast, now almost in reach of the tigress’ charge. But something raised the hackles on his sweat-wet neck. It was the old feeling. He was being watched. The tigress sensed his tension, seeing the hated stick that smelled of iron in his hands swing in her direction. He knew she was there. The ambush was ruined. As she turned and ghosted back from the bank to her kill, a small clod of earth trickled down the incline and splashed softly into the water. By the time the man could reach the top of the embankment, the Champawat Man-eater, the most successful feline human-killer of all time, had recovered her four hundred thirty-sixth victim and carried the body into a bewildering maze of rocks and ferns choked with thorn-hooked blackberry plants.
All afternoon, the lone man followed the pug marks and the heavy blood spoor marking the dozen places the tigress had stopped to feed, only to be forced on, growling in anger, by the hunter’s approach. At last, the deadly game was forced to an end. Long shadows spiked the slanting rays of the sun, beginning to settle into a fiery nest somewhere past the snaggled teeth of the western horizon. Alone and in the dark, Corbett knew he was a dead man, an easy kill for the tigress the hill people of Kumaon called Shaitan, the dark spirit. Returning to the pool of water, he took time to bury the leg of the Hindu girl so that some part of her could be recovered and burned on the Ghats, to flow from the Ganga Mai—the Mother Ganges—to the sea. Reaching the tall rock to which the frightened Indian still clung, he found the hill man quite relieved. He had heard the tiger growl many times, but no shot had reached his ears. His main worry had been how he would return to his village if the sahib had gotten himself eaten. As the shadows settled deeper into the dead girl’s village, the man sat smoking, planning for tomorrow. He knew the tigress would finish eating the girl during the night and lie up in the rocky ravine the next day. Perhaps a beat down the valley would give him a shot, forcing the man-eater into his ambush. Yes, perhaps it might.
There could be very little debate that the great subcontinent of India has suffered through the ages more than any other place on earth under the unrelenting horror of man-eating tigers and leopards. This is hardly to say that the African man-eaters were pussycats; quite to the contrary. Yet the psychological impact upon a dense population may be quickly realized by reading Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws. At least when a man-eating shark is at large in an area, one can get out of the water. When, however, a region is under the threat of a man-eating cat, the mere presence of such a creature disrupts the entire culture. Human life cannot continue in a normal manner where a man-eater is operating; crops cannot be planted or harvested in a land already bleakly famous for starvation; wood and water may be gathered only at mortal risk. But to survive, these risks are taken, and whatever the man-eater may be, tiger or leopard, it thrives on the flesh of those made bold by desperation.
The great predator of Asia—particularly with concern to man, who populates this continent more densely than any other—is the tiger. To the Westerner, the impact of this animal over the past 400 years of closely recorded history is almost unimaginable. To quote Richard Perry, a recognized expert who wrote a definitive work on this animal, The World of the Tiger, the tiger is “the monster that for four centuries certainly, and no doubt for very much longer than that, has darkened with terror the lives of millions of Indian villagers … in terms of human misery it was the constant suspense of being defenseless against a sudden and horrible death by day and night, over a period of months or even years, that broke the spirit of the villagers, rather than the actual number of deaths among them, although the latter were terrible enough.”
How many people have tigers eaten throughout their wide range of the last century? The best thinking on the matter, distilled from expert sources, indicates that tigers alone have eaten at least 500,000 Indians and certainly a minimum of one million people over the entire Asian continent in the last four centuries. In the 1800s, when man-eating was at its statistical peak, there may have been as many as 800 killer tigers in business at the same time! These conditions existed, particularly in India, until after World War II, when tiger population began to drop quickly, yet the list of victims up until nearly 1950 still numbered some 800 deaths by tiger per year. Even though the tiger is endangered for the usual reasons, incidents of man-eating are not especially rare even today.
Considering the vast amount of material written about the natural history of the tiger, I see little point in adding to it here beyond the basic consideration of the world’s largest cat as a man-eater, a profession at which he is highly talented. As an organism of carnivorous persuasion, the physical qualities of the tiger are purely awesome. A big male may weigh 550 pounds, and several have been recorded at nearly 600 pounds. The biggest—presumably a Siberian snow tiger—was presented to Nikita Khrushchev in the 1960s. Are you sitting down? Good. It weighed 700 pounds. A tiger’s claws may reach four inches in length—the better to grab you by—and whereas canine teeth probably average around three inches in length, there is one in existence that is five and one-half inches long and three and one-half inches around. Maybe the saber-tooth isn’t extinct after all!
Unlike the more gregarious lion, the tiger is a loner except when mating or with cubs, which may themselves be undertaking on-the-job training under mom if she is a man-eater. According to the literature and experience of famous tiger hunters, tigers do not seem inclined toward man-eating unless injured and unable to pursue their usual table fare. Opinions vary, but, unlike the irrefutable evidence of lions and leopards just doing what comes naturally when they take to eating folks, the majority of Indian man-eating tigers (and, to some extent, leopards) have been injured and in some way disabled. A high percentage of these cats run afoul of porcupines and get a face- or a pawful of barbed quills, which are chewed off short and remain in the body to fester and cripple. Others have been wounded by trap guns or native hunters and escaped, forced, through reduced capacity, to people-eating. Obviously, some are just old and decrepit, although even a very broken-down tiger can turn fatal attention on one hell of a lot of people before cashing in.
Hunting man-eating cats is spooky and exacting business, I can personally assure you, and those that manage to pursue this most dangerous game over a period of years and survive are, by definition, both talented and unquestionably lucky. I am the only one I know who has managed a respectable career based upon the latter consideration alone. But when it comes to India and man-eating cats, there is one name that looms through the legends like an oil tanker in a bathtub: Jim Corbett.
Born in 1875 in the town of Naini-Tal in the region known as Kumaon in India’s United Provinces, young Jim grew up in the six-thousand-foot-high mountain country a naturally gifted woodsman and hunter. His understanding and knowledge of the wooded terai and rocky jungle-choked ravines were rare even for a native shikari, or professional hunter. Matter of fact, if there was a white man who grew to know more about tigers, leopards, and the many antelopes of that corner of India tucked against the L-shaped western border of Nepal, I haven’t heard of him.
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p; Jim Corbett became an official of the Indian railways in his adulthood, a strong parallel with John Henry Patterson, who shared his occupation, rank and, of course, his man-eaters. Although he had hunted practically since he was old enough to walk and had killed a great number of tigers and leopards, Corbett was really almost more of a student of the great cats than a hunter of them. A single glance at a three-day-old tiger pug mark, and Sahib Corbett could conjure out of the smudged track the age, sex, condition, bank balance, middle name and possibly blood group of the cat. His passion for logic and progressively conclusive deductions make him seem very much a bush-going Sherlock Holmes (a character, incidentally, reputed by some to have been modeled after a remote relative of mine, Inspector Capstick, once head of Scotland Yard). Corbett’s writings are studded with fascinating diagrammed ergos, usually stimulated by a mere bent blade of grass or misplaced drop of dew, and escalating into the damnedest collection of correct diagnoses east of the Mayo Clinic. He was a fine writer and obviously a most sensitive man, but the common theme of his many books is a feeling for absolute truth. Corbett’s personal opinions are labeled as such, but his eye for detail leaves no question as to authenticity.
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