The Laughing Duck

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
-Kahlil Gibran

I once picked up a wonderful book on the subject of nature and conservation. Upon opening to a random page, my eye was right away drawn to a sketch, by the author, of a duck on a pond. The duck was on its back and it appeared to be laughing merrily. I showed the picture to my Spouse, who liked it immensely and said that the image would be worth the price of the book.
It was such a pleasant drawing and, as I am fond of animals and because I treasure images of happy creatures, I bought the book immediately.
Some months later I ventured to read the piece about the jolly duck, with the drawing I had looked at often since purchasing the volume of essays.
The piece was about hunting, which I thought rather peculiar in a book about a man's love of woodland creatures.
I understood quite quickly that the writer had been inclined to hunt purely for pleasure in the days before he became a conservationist.
With new context, I saw that the duck was not what I had envisioned: it was, instead, a sketch of the duck as it lay dead, quite dead, on its back.
I almost forgave the writer because, after all, he had changed his ways and become a wonderful storyteller and caretaker of nature. Still, it is difficult now for me to pick up that book ever since the living, laughing duck turned into a mortally wounded one. It is too close to the truth.