You Will Shoot Your Eye Out

My dad wasn’t loyal to any one rifle manufacturer. He shot them all, and he shot them well. At the tail end of his hunting career, though, he decided he liked Winchesters.

Come deer season, the first rifle out of his gun safe was a Winchester Model 70 Featherweight chambered in 7×57. After he passed away this spring, my brothers and I divvied up dad’s Winchesters. I wound up with the 7×57.

Designed by Paul Mauser of Mauser fame, the 7×57 traces its origins all the way back to the late 1800s. The Spanish Army was the first to take a chance on the new cartridge, and they loved it.

So much so that they awarded Mauser the Grand Cross of the Spanish Military Order of Merit for his efforts. The cartridge’s flat trajectory and ability to shoot heavier bullets, along with its mild recoil, endeared it to soldiers and sportsmen alike.

Along with the rifle, I also inherited a couple of boxes of my dad’s handloads, complete with notecards detailing each load’s particulars. He was getting great velocity out of his 7×57, shooting over 2,800 feet per second with a 140-grain bullet, all with that mild recoil.

That kind of performance is perfect for the whitetail that I hunt close to home here in Oklahoma, and I looked forward to carrying my dad’s rifle into the deer woods.

The Legend of the 7×57

But I make annual trips to the Oklahoma panhandle for mule deer and elk, too, and both of those species are significantly bigger than the whitetail close to home.

Even the whitetail in the panhandle can weigh 300 pounds on the hoof. I was fairly certain the 7×57 could handle the whitetail and mule deer, but I didn’t think I’d chance it for elk. Besides, I have rifles chambered in other calibers that are more suited to that task. No sense in asking a ball peen to do a sledgehammer’s work, right?

About the time I was having that thought, I was reading the biography of a hunter in Africa named Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell, a man who carried a 7×57 not for whitetail or mule deer or elk, even, but for elephant. Here I was debating the cartridge’s effectiveness on mule deer, and Bell was using it on elephant. Never has my manhood been called more into question.

Also known as WDM, a better option than Walter Dalrymple Maitland, I’m sure we’d all agree, Bell was born in Scotland to wealthy parents and a life of privilege.

But he was destined for adventure. He was riding the high seas the year he became a teenager and hunting lions for the Uganda Railway by the time he could get a driver’s license. The gold rush sent him to North America and the Boer War brought him back to Africa, where, after the war ended, he finally heeded his life’s calling and became an ivory hunter.

In so doing, he earned himself another sobriquet, and it may well be the coolest nickname of all time: Karamojo Bell.

Karamojo Bell & The Bell Shot

Bell made a name for himself by regularly walking into a parade of elephants with nothing but his 7×57, a John Rigby and Co rifle, and shooting either the herd’s bull or its matriarch, and then, as cool as a cucumber, picking off the rest of the herd one by one as they ran circles in confusion.

Having made a habit of dissecting the elephants he killed so that he could study the structure of their skulls, Bell’s research led him to conclude that the surest way to dispatch an elephant was with an oblique shot from the rear, angling his bullet through the back of the neck and up into the brain.

Eventually, this became known as The Bell Shot. You know you’re a serious rifleman when the hunting world names a shot after you. The man killed over 1,000 elephants in his career, more than three fourths of them with the 7×57.

Bell’s calm in the midst of pachyderm panic, his prowess with a rifle, and his fondness for the sweet shooting 7×57, earned him a reputation as a larger-than-life adventurer, and rightfully so. He absolutely deserves every ounce of respect he’s been given for his exploits on the Dark Continent.

The man in me just wishes he had done it all with a different cartridge.