his earnings, leaving him nearly penniless. He sold his rifle for enough money to get back to Dawson. In order to return to Africa he joined the Canadian Mounted Rifles, seeing service during the Boer War. Bell was captured when his horse was shot from under him, but he escaped and managed to get back to British lines; upon doing that he was made a scout. Big game hunter After the Boer war ended in 1902, Bell remained in Africa, becoming a professional elephant hunter. Over sixteen years spent in Africa, he hunted elephants for their ivory in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, the Lado Enclave, French Ivory Coast, Liberia, French Congo, and the Belgian Congo. He became known as "Karamojo" Bell (sometimes spelt Karamoja) because of his safaris through this remote wilderness area in North Eastern Uganda. Bell shot 1,011 elephants during his career; all of them bulls apart from 28 cows. He is noted for using smaller calibre bullets rather than the heavy recoiling, larger calibre bullets that were popular with other big game hunters. Like many other professional elephant hunters of the time, he started hunting elephant with a sporting .303 Lee Enfield rifle, taking 63 head of elephant on his first safari. Later he outfitted himself for extensive hunting safari's in the Karamojo region of Uganda, preferring the .275 (7x57) chambered in a Rigby-Mauser rifle. Around 800 of his elephant kills were made with Mauser 98 rifles chambered for the 7×57mm Mauser/.275 (using the 1893 pattern standard military grain round-nosed full metal jacket load). Bell preferred smaller calibers because they recoiled less, were lighter to carry and in his estimation killed elephant just as well as the bigger bore cartridges. Bell found that German 7x57 and English .303 military ammunition was the most reliable, which also encouraged him to use the smaller calibers. His favourite rifles were a bespoke Rigby-made 7×57mm Mauser with which he shot the majority of his elephants, a 'wand-like' Mannlicher–Schoenauer 6.5×54mm carbine, which he abandoned due to failure of the available ammunition, a Lee–Enfield sporting rifle in .303 British and Mauser rifles chambered in .318 Westley Richards. He disliked the double rifles considered archetypal for the African hunting of his time due to what he considered recoil so heavy as to be detrimental to accuracy, their delicacy in the field, their weight, and the unreliable sporting ammunition of the day. He particularly praised