COLLINS
RADIO LORE & STORIES
(mostly; well, possibly, true)
The
Moose Was Loose
(According to my log on 3/3/56 I was in QSO with W1LJN when I heard
a series of shouts ... then nothing. After reading this account I now
know what happened so many years ago. It
was during the spring of 1956, more precisely the 3rd of March; I can
remember it as if it was just yesterday. It had been a particularly
cold winter and the January "thaw" really didn't amount to
much more than three or maybe four days with temperatures above the
freezing mark. This
night was even colder and windier with snow coming down at a rate of
at least six inches per hour. Our cabin was pretty well stocked up with
food, drink, plenty of wood and one of those new gasoline generators
so we didn't have too much to be concerned about. Both of us were retired
so it really didn't make a hoot if we were stuck for a week or more.
Anyway, we had one of those new fangled motorized toboggans that they
now call "snow machines" so if we really had to get out we
could. My
friend Bert and I had finished supper at about 6:30 and Bert was relaxing
in front of the fire with a hot toddy in his hands and his stocking
feet stretched out in front of him. He was the epitome of relaxation
just stretched out idly, almost asleep, watching the shadows from the
fire dancing along the walls of the cabin. I was intently trying out
my new Collins KWS-1 Transmitter and 75A-4 Receiver which I had recently
purchased; the pair was really expensive but they were the rage of my
fellow hams at the time. When the pair arrived last week, via Leroy
Andrew's delivery truck, Bert remarked to Leroy, as he helped bring
the boxes in, that the transmitter must have weighed about five or six
hundred pounds or more and the receiver wasn't very much lighter. Of
course this was an exaggeration but Bert always liked to exaggerate. Bert
had been a woodsman for the better part of his life and was used to
hard work and heavy loads but I guess that the weight of the cumbersome
freight boxes reflected on his advancing years. Of course Leroy was
a strapping young man and built like a battleship, and had no problem
with his end of the load. I had never in my life experienced hard physical
labor, and contributed by supervising and judicially staying well out
of the way. Well,
after a couple of days we got the transmitter and receiver set up and
ran the transmitter into a 500 watt light bulb that I had used for a
dummy load; boy, did that bulb light up brighter than can-be before
it exploded into a couple of million pieces. "I think I've got
it Bert" I exclaimed. Bert agreed and remarked that he had nary
a doubt relative to my electronic capabilities and commenced to clean
up the glass fragments that covered a good portion of the floor next
to my radio table. Since
Bert was so experienced with trees I had him climb up a big Hemlock
that towered about ninety feet or so from the snow covered hill behind
the cabin. "A little higher Bert", I ordered; Bert climbed
about as high as he could and set the pulley and rope that I had given
him. We repeated the procedure again on another tree and hauled up a
150 foot wire antenna between the two giant Hemlocks. I ran
a ladder line from the center of the antenna down to the peak of the
roof of the cabin and then inside to the transmitter and receiver. After
I had attached the antenna lead-in I held my breath while firing up
the two radios. At first there was a lot of static and then after a
while came in the voices of hams from various parts of the world. Well,
you can imagine my excitement when I grabbed the shiny D-104 microphone
and shouted CQ, CQ, CQ this is amateur radio station W1XYZ transmitting
from our cabin in the far north of the US of A; can anybody out there
hear me? I listened
intently for a reply and with nothing heard tried again…..and
again…..and again. Finally, I got a reply from a fellow in England.
Can you imagine that; all the way from the frozen north of the US of
A to England - why that's clear across the ocean from here. Well,
of course Bert was not impressed at all and just sat there stretched
out on his Morris chair sipping his hot toddy. He did, however, remark
that he could hear the English fellow very clearly and thought that
the clarity was indeed attributed to the quality of the receiver that
I was using and that big speaker with the fancy chrome covered light
fixed atop of it. Although Bert was not a ham he had a good ear for
that type of thing; after all, he had worked all his life in the woods
and had to listen for wild animals and the like; so, I always took him
at his word when it came to audio quality. As
I have previously described, the weather this night was particularly
brutal. The wind was howling a gale and the snow was coming down at
an unbelievable rate. Between transmissions I had looked out the front
window and saw that the snow had come over the lower part of the windows
on the first floor and was accumulating fast. I remarked to Bert that
".. I'll wager that it won't be long before the snow is over the
windows and up to the front porch roof." Bert silently nodded his
head in agreement and totally unconcerned placed a couple more logs
on the fire before retreating back to his Morris chair. About
nine o'clock or so I heard what I thought was the rumbling of an avalanche,
Bert thought the same thing. I looked outside again but the windows
were so completely covered with snow I couldn't see a damned thing.
There had been no flashes of lightning so it probably wasn't thunder,
but then we both heard the awful thunderous sounds again. This time
it came- BANG, BANG, BANG - THUD, CRASH!!! Bert leaped up from his chair
spilling the remains of his hot toddy on the floor - I reacted about
the same. The crash came from the front peak of our cabin and we both
fully expected to see a tree branch or even an entire tree coming through
the wall or roof or perhaps it was an avalanche and the roof was caving
in. Absolutely
terrified, we both peered up at the source of the noise and were astonished
and totally unprepared to see:
You
can imagine our surprise when we both saw that a thousand pound moose
had bulled his way through the exterior wall of our cabin right into
our living room. Bert thought that he must have been going "a hundred
miles per hour or more with the wind behind his back, I agreed. "Good
thing that the snow was as high as it was", I remarked, "or
he would have come clean through our front door". I got
on the phone and called Doc Jones, the local vet, and described the
situation to him. "Well, I can't come out tonight," responded
Doc, "but I'll try to get out there in the morning- just feed him
some carrots and a little lettuce if you have some and he should be
OK for the night." Doc
did come out the next morning but was unable, even with our help, to
free the moose from the hole that he had made in our front wall. The
best we could do is put the poor animal out of his misery, after several
hundred pounds of lettuce and carrots, of course. We kept the head part
in the cabin as a reminder and even constructed a fancy neckpiece to
kind of set off the head and make it appear that it had been professionally
done; I'm certain the moose would have liked that. I wondered
if the reason for the intrusion was because of the high winds and extreme
weather but Bert insisted that it was most probably "the outstanding
Collins 75A-4 receiver audio that attracted the big fellow and prompted
the crash". I guess that I'll just have to agree and go along with
Bert's assessment because Bert had a good ear for that kind of thing
and the Collins folks had a reputation for making quality electronic
equipment. That "A-4" with the fancy lighted speaker certainly
sounded good to me too. THE END |