I'm going to tell you a little story here, and it is going to take some time, so stay with me. It is about outdoor writers and the stories they tell. It is about journalistic institutions and the truths they hide. And it is about those things too good to be true, and how they often turn out to be false.

It is, in the end, what one fisherman taught me about people.

The story begins with a family of ducks crossing an Alaska lake. The time is spring, and the mama duck is leading the way across the water with her little duckings all strung out behind. They are as cute as little animals everywhere. And, as things are about to turn out, nature is as cruel and capricious as it is everywhere.

As the ducks are crossing the lake, the water swirls, and a couple of the ducklings disappear into the maw of a hungry, savage northern pike. Afterward, a lone feather floats to the surface of the water. Or something like that. I admit to having forgotten the fine details of the story over time, but I well remember the bulk of it because, as it turned out, the story as written was too good to be true.

It had been penned for the Anchorage Daily News by a friendly and competent freelance writer who will remain nameless here. Whether or not to name this writer was a subject of considerable discussion at Alaska Dispatch. Some who read this column might conclude it's a little hypocritical not to name him. But what happened in this case happened decades ago, and it is possible -- no, probable -- that the writer in question is today different than he was then. We all change day to day, month to month, year to year. If you are optimistic about the human condition, you like to believe people can change for the better. I hope this writer has changed for the better though I know the business in which he works has not changed.

Being a freelance writer is a tough job. You're always scrambling to write something you can sell, and back when this incident happened, there wasn't much money to be had writing stories for the Daily News. Granted, the situation was better than it is today. Now, the Daily News doesn't pay writers; it solicits volunteers. Though the newspaper leans to the left editorially, it financially believes writers should consider themselves blessed to have their words printed in a publication making 20 percent per year or greater profits while whining about tough economic times.

The Daily News never did pay a lot, however. And, of course, it only ever paid on acceptance, meaning that if you wanted a check, you had to write a story the newspaper was going to publish. The writer in question -- let's call him Ernest -- had a knack for meeting those standards. Sometimes I and other editors at the newspaper in those days wondered about some of his stories, but we didn't ask a lot of questions.

At least we didn't until the pike swallowed the ducklings. Pike are known to do this. Biologists studying pike have removed ducklings from the stomachs of this fish. But I had never met anyone who had actually seen this relatively rare form of predation take place. So, as the outdoor editor at the Daily News when Ernest submitted a story that opened with his description of this taking place, I called him at home in Fairbanks to chat about it. I had an inkling he might be embellishing, and I thought a simple conversation about the story would give him the chance to come clean if he was.

I asked him the name of the lake on which he was fishing. He gave me a name. I told him it was pretty cool he got to witness something many people talk about but few ever see. He said it was. I let it go, made some small talk and hung up the phone, but something kept bothering me.

I've spent my life in journalism, a business that is supposed to be about some sort of search for the truth. I know that sounds all high and mighty and idealistic. Excuse me for that. But at a minimum, journalists are supposed to try to separate fact from fiction. Lord knows we botch the facts enough with simple mistakes. We really don't need to be -- as half-term, ex-governor of Alaska Sarah Palin once observed -- making things up.