Retired Olds probation officer Bruce Herzog dealt with a lot of personalities over his 30-year career.
But one creative-thinking guy sticks out in his mind.
"He had been in an actual shootout with the cops. He was a pretty bad dude in his younger days. And he had been shot in the abdomen and arrested, and then of course spent the first number of months of his jail sentence in the hospital in prison," Herzog recalls. "He was a great big rough, gruff-looking kind of cowboy sort of guy."
As part of his probation order, Herzog's client had to do some community service work.
Often Herzog's office would send parolees over to the Medicine River Wildlife Centre (MRWC) to do their service work there and thereby help out the hospital at the same time.
So Herzog suggested to MRWC executive director Carol Kelly that this new guy could help her out.
"He's dealing with me at this point and he's got to do a bunch of community service work. As part of his order, he was supposed to do some volunteer work.
"She said, 'yeah, we can always use him -- you know, we need this painted and that rebuilt and whatever else. But what we really need is some food for all of our wildlife.'
"She said, 'well, we've had a bad, dry winter, dry fall,' whatever it was 'and we don't have any mice, and most of these birds of prey and other animals -- a lot of these other animals that have been injured and they're in the wildlife centre -- they eat that kind of stuff and we want to give them (something that's) as close to their natural diet as possible, so that when they're released they'll be OK and they'll be able to pick up where they left off.
"So I said, 'well, maybe we'll be able to work something out.'
"So I talked to this guy and I said, 'you know, Carol can use you, but she's wondering if there's anything you can do to help her out with this food issue with the wildlife.
"And he said, 'well, I can snare gophers.'
"And I said, 'OK, so you're supposed to do a hundred hours of community service. What's a snared gopher worth? How long does it take you to snare a gopher?'
"So we had this discussion. I said to this guy, 'look, I'll tell you what. For every two gophers, I'll give you an hour. You ought to be able to snare a couple of gophers in an hour.'
"He said, 'yeah, that sounds good, sure.'
"So I get a call from Carol Kelly about a week and a half later. She says, 'your guy showed up here with a sack full of 130 frozen gophers.'
"I said, 'what?'
"She said 'yeah.'
"I said, 'I only talked to him, like, a week and a half ago.' So I said, 'well, you know, he's done his hours then. That's the deal.'
"So we gave him his hours. I forget exactly what the numbers were. But he satisfied the agreement, so I wrote it off.
"And the next time I saw the guy I said, 'how the heck did you do that?'
"He said, 'well, I hired every kid in the neighbourhood for 25 cents a gopher.'
"I kind of forgot that but it came back to me the other day, because you know, these guys, they're always thinking, they're always looking for an angle. You've always got to have your head up.
"But I'll never forget that, because he was an entrepreneurial guy and he took me on that one. I had to give him the credit, we made a deal. A deal's a deal. But I learned a lesson on that occasion."
