Thread: Karamojo Bell comments

Thanks for posting that @JohnDuxbury - am going to make sure I get both the titles you mentioned.

Here is a link (hopefully it works) to some digital copies of some of Bells books

https://archive.org/details/texts?query=Karamojo

there was account of an poacher of elephants who used a decrepid .22 short rifle....when questioned he told them how,the ydidnt believe him till shown...same as the OLD elephant bow guys,they laid in wait ON the elephant trail and shot up into armpit......fark that,thats like rolling under a moving mack truck but worse....the 22 short had just enough power to go into heart,elephent would take off and die soon enough.
polar bears.....you took small long skinny slivers of seal rib bone and ties them up in a tiny ball and set them in fat to set...when poler bear started to follow you,drop a few of the balls of fat...polar bear ate them...fat melted,bone sprung open and pierced its guts,it got crook and tipped over,Ive read of same trick being used on big crocs just on bigger scale...... cruel as heck in todays context...if it was kill it or be eaten yourself,it was bloody clever.
like the idea of up a tree and shoot down into head..... much better idea for bear than lay down and kiss your arse goodbye....all about context.

I dont know if that is the same thing as using a 7x57 to brain shoot the elephant....Bell's appraoch was very successful. He didnt always brain shoot them either, he wrote that the body shot is not to be despised, and they died handily enough when shot over the heart with a 7mm or a .303 too. IT was just that they would run for a couple of hundred metres before they did, and take the rest of the herd off with them when they did. And they didnt stop for miles.

Bell wanted all the big tusks in a herd of elephants, thats why he preferred the brain shot. The shot itself often didnt disturb the elephant much, and a brain shot elephant would drop to its knees and stay there, with its ears still flapping like it was alive. The rest would look at him and then keep feeding. Mr Walter Bell would then climb on top of the elephant so he wouldnt get trampled, and shoot the rest of them. They would also run if a shot elephant would drop and then roll over and touch another one, so he would try (at least at the start of a shoot up) to pick animals that were clear of the others.

Sooner or later, (sooner if they had been shot at before by Arabs with muzzleloaders) the group remaining would figure what was up and would run. He would bang a couple of heart shots into whoever was passing him, and then he would be off after the rest on foot. This is where his "Bell shot" came about. He would range up behind the elephant at a run, then move to the side. The fleeing elephant would now and then turn its head to see if it was being followed, and then Bell would stop, put up his rifle and give it the "Bell shot"" which is a shot angled through the back of the elephants neck forward into the brain.

(This is where the .318 WR was superior: This shot from the rear at a fleeing elephant requires a lot of penetration, and sometimes with the .275 there would be inexplicable misses. What was happening was the long skinny 173 grain 7mm bullet was bending on impact and ending up in the wrong place in the animal. With the 250 grain .330 bullet, it followed a straight course, and the ""inexplicable misses"" stopped. (The .318 Westeley Richards is a .30/06 case necked out to .330 - basically just a .30/06 with a heavy bullet. It was a staple of the British Empire for decades. EJ Herrick shot his Fiordland moose with one. Major RA Wilson and others in New Zealand also used one too. It was a standard British big game rifle cartridge up until WW2.)

This was all mostly close range. He mentioned 40 yards in a general way. He describes sighting his rifles in so that the bead covered the group at 80 yards, so it seems he expected to be shooting at less than that.

He says that elephant were much less wary than later, and in his days they were everywhere. But it still wasn't an easy way to make a living. He estimated he walked 70 miles for every bull elephant he killed. He wore out 24 pairs of boots in a year. And after walking (or running) down elephant in the Ugandan heat, they used to drink the warm water from the elephants carcass (found in a bladder the animals have.)

Bell wrote that he couldnt see any difference between a .450/400 on an elephant or a 7x57 in killing power. If you shot it in the same place with both, they creature died, and if you shot it badly, it ran away.

But, if you want to know how he was so successful as an elephant hunter, it wasnt much to do with the rifles, although he was a superlative shot. (JA Hunter describes seeing him shoot fish jumping from a lake once. And he famously once was found shooting flying comorants out of the sky with his rifle - just burning through a batch of bad .318 ammo.) IT was all to do with his relations with the African people. In the days of racism and colonial oppression, Bell seemed to genuinely like the Africans and got on well with them, and the Karamojo was a violent warlike place in those days, yet he had very little trouble.

HIs secret to elephant hunting was to offer a reward for any information on where to find bull elephant. If he shot anything off a tip, he would reward his informants with cow. To young men in the Karamojan culure, cows were like gold and nearly impossible to get, and they could get a start in life with one or two. So he had the all the Africans where he was hunting keen to let him know where to find elephants - and then oafter he took the tusks, the villages got all the meat. Mountains of it.

Originally Posted by stug

Here is a link (hopefully it works) to some digital copies of some of Bells books

https://archive.org/details/texts?query=Karamojo

Enormous Bull Elephant sized thanks for posting the e book link @stug ! I have been reading a bit each night, wonderful insight and adventure. Should be a compulsory read before joining the forum