During his first years in Canada, my father worked at several farm-related jobs near the family farm in Simons Valley, Alberta– emigrants had few other choices. One summer, he decided his “fortune” would be sooner attained through gopher hunting than by working for nearby farmers. The provincial government had offered a bounty for every gopher tail produced. Martin was right; he and his cousin, Jacob Sawatzky, had a successful “hunting” season. The gopher itself was sold to the Colpitts fox farm for food. Perhaps his gopher-trapping experience in Orenburg during the famine of 1922 had provided him with the “tricks” that made him a more effective gopher trapper.