Sacrifice is a perennial theme for me. In a recent column I discussed two kinds of sacrifice. One involves the waiver of some personal gratification, a selfless gift that contributes to creation. The other is a selfish taking of life, a killing made for private gain.

Giver, taker. Good sacrifice, bad sacrifice. Such black-and-white contrasts can energize conversations, like positive and negative poles in a battery. They can also polarize our thinking and coop us up in combative worldviews. We can become so fixated on dualities that we miss something crucial to our understanding.

Two ducks recently reminded me of this fact. Jennifer and our daughters named them Coffee and Cream because of the light and dark coloring of their respective breeds. Raised on separate farms, Coffee and Cream were brought together after predators killed their companions.

I love ducks. They eat slugs and can be useful in a garden (their feet are webbed, so they don’t tear up the beds like chickens). Duck eggs are delicious. So is their flesh, though unlike chickens I’ve never killed and eaten my own ducks. I’m not sure that I could, and so I tend to pass over them on restaurant menus.

Ducks are notoriously comical creatures, but have you ever seen one grieve? There’s no other way to describe what I saw following the death of Cream’s companions on our farm. When a neighbor brought us Coffee, after she experienced the same trauma, I’ll never forget the solace of their new friendship. Within hours they were inseparable, waddling in tandem, probing the muck with their bills and making contented duck sounds.

Life on a farm -- even a tiny one like ours -- has deepened my respect for the creatures we depend on for joy and nourishment. My dualistic view of sacrifice falls short of the mark when I think of the animals we kill. How do we provide for our family in a humane way that contributes to creation?

The question will seem silly to some readers. We live in a society where killing humans is celebrated, and trained killers are lionized as heroes. The fact that innocents are slaughtered in the process hasn’t deterred us from diverting massive amounts of resources into the commerce of killing. Given this behavior, why concern ourselves with the ethical treatment of livestock?

Because some long journeys begin with baby steps, fellow predators. Killing may be necessary, and killers may be worthy of respect for their prowess. My grandmother was really good at killing chickens, for example. But she didn’t glorify it, and we shouldn’t either. Not even with mean roosters. Never with human beings

The path to goodness begins with humility. Those silly ducks steered me in the right direction.

One evening I was down at the barn, going through my routine chores. When I went to close Coffee and Cream in their coop for the night, I noticed that their watering container was empty. So I took it to the spigot on the other side of the barn, filled it up, and carried it back to them. “There you go,” I thought, and went back to the house.

The next morning, Cream’s half-eaten body was lying outside the coop door I forgot to fasten. Coffee was alive, maybe because she was darker-colored and less noticeable at night. She seemed grief stricken for most of the day, but by the afternoon it looked like she might be recovering a little.

Of course that evening I made sure to fasten the coop door. Coffee did not want to go in, after the terror of the night before. But I herded her in and shut her in securely. “Did you close up the coop?” Jennifer asked when I got back to the house. “You bet,” I said, and we both slept soundly knowing we’d done what was necessary.

I cried as I buried Coffee next to Cream the following morning. Her death resulted from my failure to notice the hole that was gnawed in the corner of the coop. At some level Coffee knew she faced death in that terrible place, yet she had no choice but to obey my will as I herded her in there. Like a lamb to the slaughter.

Shoveling dirt into her grave I thought of the words of my hero. “Forgive them,” said the rabbi, “for they know not what they do.”

Repentance and forgiveness are inseparable. If we learn from the blood shed by our ignorance, we can accept the humbling gift of forgiveness. We have to. Otherwise our hearts will be hardened with arrogance and some other revelation will escape our attention.

Several days after the tragedy, I was writing at my shop when I heard a familiar noise. At first I thought it was my imagination, because I’ve never heard that sound anywhere near the bookstore. Then I heard it again, and a sense of urgency brought me to my feet.

I went outside and followed the sound to the park across the street. Next to the children’s playground, a dozen mallards were probing the wet sod with their bills. One had strayed off to herself and was calling out to check in with the others.

“We are not separate,” she said. “I’m still here with you.”

An earlier version of this column was published in the Cannon Beach Citizen. It is cross-posted at FireDogLake.com.