In this anecdate about shooting birds out of the sky with a rifle, he was shooting comorants flying low over lake Victoria, range of about 300 feet. He was getting about 6-7 out of 10 of them apparently, two spanish gentlemen came over to ask if they could borrow his shotgun, and were amazed to find it was a rifle.
He was using up .318 Westeley Richards ammunition, which was prone to splitting at the neck, or misfiring. (It probably didn't help either that in his .318 WR double rifle, one of the chambers had serious headspace issues. Have corresponded with modern owner of it.)
Another one I like myself, was that he was seen shooting fish in the air that were jumping from the surface of a lake.
(After a wile Bell starts to sound like a hunting super hero...)
A lot of people have mentioned his coolness under pressure and put his good shooting down to that, but on the contrary he would write that he was often of a nervious disposition when it came to elpehant hunting, with a trememndous desire to shoot - and that he had to calm himself down, he said to count to ten before doing anything.
What is just as interesting is that he shot around 800 buffalo, mostly with a 6.5 or 7mm Mauser also. He never had much trouble shooting buffalo, and he was never charged even once; but he wrote in a letter to a friend that he made it his business to never have a wounded one, and made evry effort to kill them outright. (Also, he was shooting them for meat and hides, so he wasn't singling out big bulls, he was laying waste to groups of them)
It is fascinating to think that this young man started shooting lions for the railways when he was sixteen, was hunting elephants for a living at the age of 22, after already having made a living shooting elk for meat in the Yukon, and fighting in the Boer war.
He did indeed complete the majority of his African hunting by the time he was 35, but then he went and joined the RFC and started shooting at flying Germans.
(It would also pay to remember that he didn't need to make a living doing anything really...google 'Clifton Hall' near Edinborough sometime. It's a school now, but it was his family home. It's a [bleep] castle.)
Another anecdote I like - sometime around 1909-10, he heard about flying machines as being viable (there was a well publicised flying race ie Those Magnificanet Men in Their Flying Machines" etc, and so he immediately sent a telegram to his sisters asking them to purchase one of those flying machiens and sent it to East Africa along with as much fuel as possible.
They cabled back again, having made inquiries, and quietly explained that flying required considerable tuition.
He immedaitly went back to England and got flying lessons, plainly believing that he could use the plane for spotting elephant. But his lessons were a dispointment - the pupils got one hour of flying time a month, the rest of the time they just taxiied around on the ground and he became dissatisfid and went back to Africa. But there are foreshadowings of why he joined the RFC at the start of WW1, he already had in interest in flying.
He comes across in his books as a very moderate, even tempered, likeable man, and quite modern compared to some of his contemporaries. (such as Roosevelt for example) It suprises me sometimes to rememebr that when he published "Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter" in 1923, at the age of 43 and at the start of his retirement from elephant hunting, it was still six years before they would even invent sound movies.
