Now here's an interesting story.
We walked down to the dock and had dinner in a restaurant overlooking the harbor. While I was in the restroom my buddy struck up a conversation with a young mother with an infant, who was hanging out in the corner of the restaurant with a few young people. She was waiting for her husband, one of the local fishermen, to return from the Sound for the evening. She eventually came over and sat with us. I didn't think too much of it at the time; just pleasant conversation, a young woman humoring a couple of old men.
The next day Wayne offhandedly said to me, 'Mark, we've been in Alaska for five days now and haven't had any fish yet.' I smiled. I then told him that years ago I had learned of a saying amongst the Alaskan native peoples: you do not hunt a whale, you receive a whale. So I told him not to worry about it; we didn't need to go looking for fish. When the time was right, we would receive fish.
An hour later the young woman whom we had chatted with the night before pulled up to the airplane in her truck, rolled down her window, and handed us a jar of smoked salmon! Wayne's jaw hit the ground. Then she offered us an invitation to her parent's house for dinner! And of course dinner consisted of every kind of seafood that could be caught locally.
Wayne will never doubt me again.
