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On opposite sides of the world, two hunter-philosophers honor the rifle of the great elephant hunter.

[By Peter Ryan & Roger Pinckney]

Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell was a man in full, a Scotsman who showed adversity the proverbial stiff upper lip. Explorer, mapmaker, meat-hunter, gold miner, sailor, soldier, fighter pilot, prisoner of war, author, artist. Call him by his nickname, and you’ll suddenly remember how he made his fortune: Karamojo Bell, the ivory hunter who led yearlong safaris into country no European had mapped or even seen, before the “Lunatic Line” punched rails into Uganda and Colonel Patterson killed the Man-eaters of Tsavo. Bell shot man-eaters, too, taking his first when he was only 17.

Bell straddled the centuries, leaving footprints in both Victorian and Nuclear Ages. His experiences were never rivaled, though his conclusions were widely reviled and continue controversial to this day. Bell believed it wasn’t the power of a cartridge that made it effective, but the construction of the bullet and the placement thereof, the surgeon’s shot, if you will. And he left evidence: over 1,000 dead tuskers, most killed by cartridges modern hunters consider barely adequate for large deer.

Bell went to Africa as a boy in 1897, “at the close of the Age of Exploration,” but with, he wryly notes, “blank areas still on maps the size of France.” Bell brought his first rifle from home, a falling block .303 by Fraser of Edinburgh, “light, handy, beautifully sighted.” But, alas, extraction was inadequate, and after the cordite propellant baked in the tropical sun, unlikely. Bell was helpless until his gun-bearer fetched up the ramrod.

Bell got no closer with Rifle #2, “a single-shot Winchester .450 obtained from a wandering Greek trader.” It was likely a storied “high wall,” but we still guess at the actual caliber: .45-90, .45-110, .45-120? Bell never says.

Maybe he’d just as soon forget. “It would have been very well,” Bell notes, “except all the ammunition I got with the rifle had been black powder with that ghastly failure, the hollow copper point bullet.” A tangle with a man-eating lion continued Bell’s education. Or more to the point, a woman-eating lion, as Simba soon learned the village women went about unarmed.

One morning, no woman being handy, a lion was casting covetous eyes on the pack donkeys. A native armed with a muzzle-loader sounded the alarm, and he and Bell set out to interrupt breakfast. Noting the “ghastly bullet’s” previous explosive performance on lighter game, Bell drew a bead on the lion’s head, expecting to blow it into tiny pieces. But to Bell’s considerable dismay, the shot provoked only “a most unholy growling and lashing about.”

Bell and the native struck up the trail. The lion leaped upon the native, presenting Bell with “the most vexing of shots,” but he managed to get another bullet into the beast’s shoulder, albeit to inclusive results. The native beat a retreat and came back with reinforcements, 50 men with knives and clubs, even drums. They found the lion, too sick for further combat, and finished him off. Bell, having lost all confidence in his Winchester, was terrified throughout. To the natives, it was just another day.

Bell ordered up a postmortem, and the hands got busy with their pangas. The first bullet had entered just below the left eye and broke the lion’s jaw. From there, by all laws of ballistics, it should also have broken the lion’s neck and laid him out flat. But the “ghastly bullet” had come apart, and no single piece was big enough to do damage. Ditto the shoulder shot. It made a terrible mess, but wouldn’t break bone.

Rifle #3 was a .303 Lee Metford, a variation of the military version, with civilian stock and sights. The ammunition was cordite, with 215-grain round-nose solids. Thus equipped, Bell embarked on his first elephant safari.

It wasn’t that simple, of course. The Yukon Gold Rush and the Boer War got in the way, and Bell shot meat for the first and got captured in the second. But when things settled down, the Lee acquitted itself well: 63 bull elephants the first time out, 50 Cape buffalo for meat and leather, zebras and giraffes for trade, and two lions for threatening the pack train, all without serious incident or failure.

Bell shot numerous rifles after that: a .318 Westley Richards, a .450/400 Jeffery by Thomas Bland (with the triggers wired together so both barrels went off simultaneously!), and a 6.5 x 54 Mannlicher Schoenauer (“the most beautiful rifle ever made”).

A custom gun? After his first load of ivory, Bell could afford any rifle in the world. He chose a 7 x 57, a German Mauser, slicked up in England by Rigby and marked .275 in the English fashion. Why? Likely because Bell recalled being targeted by Boer riflemen with their M-95 Mausers some years before. Bell kept tally on that Rigby-Mauser. Expending 1,200 rounds of military full-metal jacket, the rifle took 800 elephants, with an average of 1.5 shots per kill.

Bell ignores our astonishment. Speaking from beyond the grave, he teases us with a single question: Why, of all the guns he used, did the Mauser slug make a particular whine upon exiting an elephant’s skull?

Back up, Bwana Tembo. You mean a 173-grain round-nosed .28-caliber solid, loafing along but whirling like a dervish, could shoot clean through six feet of hide and bone and brain and still go singing off into the mopane never-never, yet be audible above a riot of other enraged elephants, all with scant report and almost no recoil?

Red hartebeast from Rooipoort Nature Reserve, taken with Pete Ryan’s elegantly restored 7 x 57.

Bell’s men called it magic. I can’t peg it as physics or voodoo, but I know this: A hunter would do well with a rifle like that. And this is the story of how—and why—two men on opposite sides of the globe chose to build theirs. Two rifles, both quite different, yet of the same heart.

The soul of any rifle is its action. Bell’s wasn’t just a classic; it’s the classic. The first rifle lives in South Carolina and is based on the 1908 Brazilian Mauser, a product of the DMW arsenal in Berlin. Crisp engineering; just cut and reweld the bolt handle to clear a scope. Restocked, this is the classic sporter based on a military action.

The second is on a civilian action, BRNO Model 21, a 1949 small-ring Mauser, now safe in its final home in New Zealand. Why bother? Well, these double-square bridge models are among the most sought after in the world for good reason. Butterknife bolt handle. Double-set, double-phase trigger, barrel band, wonderful iron sights. Again, that bolt handle underwent a little fiddling to clear a scope, but that’s about all.

Both these rifles can be found in 7 x 57 and with barrels that still shoot like crazy. But why do all this for a sedate old caliber? We have newer, sexier rounds that do the same thing, in new rifles, too. Hardly anybody even chambers a rifle in 7 x 57 anymore, so surely we’re looking at the twilight years of a clunker.

Mauser’s cartridge was an astonishingly modern invention way back in 1892, at the dawn of smokeless powder. Not long after, the Englishman John Rigby, wary of anti-German sentiment, simply renamed it for himself, and so we also have the .275 Rigby. Today, lawyers would be involved. Incidentally, mainstream manufacturers are still using Mauser’s bolt action well over a century after he devised it. The equivalent would be someone designing, say, the A380 airbus or the flat-screen TV back in 1892, and it still being in use today.

But one thing at a time: The 7 mm/08 is widely seen as the heir to Mauser’s patent, though why is hard to understand when you look at the facts. It’s a genuinely effective round, but the Mauser has more case capacity, and infinitely more charisma. It’s like comparing a lunchroom microwave to a wood-fired pizza oven—superficially the same thing, with very different reality.

The Mauser case offers much more to hand-loaders, and in factory ammo the old boy runs riot, with loads ranging from 140 grains up to the long, heavy-for-caliber 175-grain projectiles. The light loads are pleasant and remarkably efficient, even by modern standards. They do the job on deer-sized game with little fuss or recoil, and shoot remarkably flat.

It’s at the far end of the spectrum where the old Mauser becomes something completely different, and the ’08 can’t follow. Experts once called the 7 x 57 a ballistician’s delight. When you take a long, heavy, round-nose soft point and send it out at modest velocity—say, 2,600 fps or thereabouts—some strange things happen. The creaky old .318 Westley Richards is a good example. In all the ways that count, it’s the equivalent of the most widely lauded cartridge on earth, the .30/06, yet it’s dead as mutton today. How can that be? It’s that long, heavy bullet and mild velocity. Faster must be better, especially to gun reviewers splitting hairs or manufacturers selling new cartridges. Who wants a slower round?

Well, we do. At least 90 percent of game is taken under 300 yards, a surprising amount at 100. Within those ranges, the Mauser cartridge has accuracy and trajectory comparable to modern hunting rounds, whose zippy velocity (and the blast and recoil that go with it) really becomes an advantage only outside normal hunting range.

At average hunting ranges, the special ballistics of that long projectile come into play, turning it into something most people have never seen, don’t understand, and refuse to accept. Were it not for Bell and his sub-caliber bullets whining off into the mopanes after exiting an elephant’s skull, that secret might have been lost forever.

But there are more factors at play than just the shape of the projectile. There’s spin—not the kind that sells magnums, but twist. Many commercial rounds today have a barrel twist of 1 in 10 inches or more, but many 57s have a twist of 1 in 8 inches, some even less. “Mechanical cruelty,” Colonel Whelen called it. Do the math. One and a half turns to the foot at 2,600 fps. That’s a theoretical 3,900 revolutions per second. Putting aside the fine detail, it’s safe to say that long slug is spinning hell-for-leather when it leaves the muzzle. At modest velocity, and with this kind of ferocious rotation, projectiles don’t need to be high tech. They just work.

There has never been a more successful recipe for penetration than a very long round-nose projectile, launched at medium velocity, with a high rate of twist. And penetration is exactly what Bell was after. So was Hemingway, who wrote so confidently about the “far shoulder” theory. In fact, a whole generation of African hunters argued—are still arguing—that complete penetration of vital organs and bone, along with a splashy exit wound, makes the difference between success and failure, or in some pursuits, life and death.

Ask Jim Corbett, a 7 x 57 fan, who used one in 1926 to take down the famous man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag. Ask the handful of Boer commandos whose 7 x 57s gave the British Empire so much grief with withering long-range fire. Ask Jack O’Connor, who shot the 7 x 57 a lot. Ask the Scandinavians, who’ve been happily tipping over moose with the 7 x 57 for a century, using their excellent ammunition. The heavy soft points may not offer modern dazzle, but they offer penetration in spades, along with a low report and recoil so negligible, Queen Elizabeth owns one. Shot it on safari, too, and at last report had no plans to give it up. Then there are the professionals of the modern era: Mike Rowbotham, Peter Johnstone, Finn Aagaard, Jim Carmichael. In more recent times, Craig Boddington has declared openly that he wouldn’t hesitate to tackle an undisturbed Cape buffalo with a 7 x 57. It would be a brave man to suggest these people don’t know what they’re talking about.

There is a point that must be made with these two Mausers: They aren’t restorations, nor are they an attempt to re-create the Bell rifle. It’s still around, by the way. It was bought by Bob Ruark, who gifted it to Harry Selby’s son Mark, who took it to Botswana in fairly recent years.

No, a strict museum-style re-creation would be a little lame, but a project in the spirit of the thing is another proposition altogether. Keep the action, keep the enigmatic old caliber, keep the simplicity. Above all, keep the charisma. As any gal will tell you, charisma counts.

Why bother? Because these pieces are a tribute to the best and most enduring love affair in the rifle world. Because they honor the great hunters of the past. Because they work, and work on a level most people can’t even comprehend. Because one of these rifles has already been to Africa, and the other has just come back.

That’s why.

Roger says, I really don’t care to shoot an elephant, though I’ve taken considerable offense at their antics, bluff charging the safari car, squealing and stomping, throwing great clods of earth and such, tipping trees on both sides of my tent at four in the morning. Even so, I had no desire to shoot one, though I’ve often wished someone else would.

No, I don’t care to kill an elephant, but any rifle that will kill something so big, so dead, so quick gets my attention. I have not been disappointed. My period Mauser has racked up an impressive roll—deer and boar beyond recollection, black bear, puku, impala, warthogs, some in the tightest tangles, others at impossible and unmentionable ranges. It rode along on my first buffalo hunt. Though a .416 did the job with a single shot, it was mighty satisfying to have the old Mauser in ready reserve. Had I a magazine of 7 mm solids, roles would have been reversed.

And it gets better. Try as I may—and I have tried plenty—I cannot make better ammo than I can buy. No need to puzzle data or belabor the hours hooked over a reloading press. Federal 175-grain round nose is commonly available in the States, with just enough lead showing to make it legal where the law mandates “expanding type bullets.” At 100 yards, that century-old bore will put holes in a biscuit all day long. Not an American biscuit, mind you, which is thick and cakey and bigger than a doorknob, but an African biscuit, a cracker, we call them in the States, maybe the size of a half crown.

Expanding? I can only guess. After 30 years of hard hunting on three continents, I’ve never recovered an expended slug. Never. Head shots, heart shots, side shots, neck shots, quartering shots before or away, a last-chance breakdown shot to the base of the tail—no bullet was ever seen again. And though I always listen for the whine of the departing bullet, I’ve never heard it. Maybe that’s because I refuse to shoot an elephant.

Pinckney with a 400-pound black bear and 1908 DWM 7 x 57, his rifle of choice for 30-odd years.

Peter says, We’re assaulted at every side by the belief that new is better. The 7 mm/08 is a great case in point. I’ve used it a lot, most recently on stags and for general deer culling, and it works. But with 100 years to improve on the Magnificent Seven, all they’ve been able to come up with is something almost as good. It just can’t shift the freight with the heavier bullets, and its history is mundane, the necked-down son of a committee caliber.

The argument for complete penetration versus explosive transfer of energy is a constant across campfires in every hunting country. There is no final answer, just what each of us is comfortable with, and I’m happy with a long bullet that will expand a bit—we’re not talking about solids here—but will go straight as a laser and deep every time. The sectional density of those long bullets is phenomenal. I’ve hunted Africa many times now, and most of if not all the professionals I’ve met there like an exit. No screwups on bone, and bloedspoor, a blood trail to follow if need be. That’s good enough for me.

Roger’s military conversion is probably very close to what Bell would understand as a rifle to take to Africa. It’s a working piece and a damn fine one. The sporting model offers more opportunity for embellishment. It won’t shoot any better—though it groups an inch—but for some, that detail is part of the joy of ownership.

In this case, the wood comes from an English walnut planted in the 1860s, a generation before the Mausers created the 7 mm cartridge or the action that bears their name. The tree was dug out and slabbed in 1994, the blank cut in 1998, and carefully aged since. The stock work is period, with shadow-line cheek piece in the London style. The grip cap, French gray scroll around a gold map of Africa, the sling personally sourced from the hide of a Cape buffalo bull. Being a double square bridge, there’s no drilling; scope mounts go straight onto the dovetail. They are the superb QD model made by Alaska Arms. The blue is deep satin. It took six months to put together.

Then it went to Africa. And one day it will go to my son, who may do the same.

When something old works, it really works.

https://www.grayssportingjournal.com/the...ZlxuOy8gIwifR8o

Edited by NitroX (29/01/23 05:19 AM)