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Don't believe everything you read from the Patron saint of the Internet, either

Like many girls, my daughter Erin dearly wanted a horse. It didn't help that her stepmom grew up in a barn. Figuratively speaking. Lisa scratched her itch riding ponies and quarter horses at shows in Kentucky until she was about 13 years old.

Living in urban Alaska, we couldn't have handled a horse without a significant shake-up in lifestyle and family finances. It helped assuage my occasional twinges of guilt that Erin didn't linger too long on the notion. But when I'm shopping for gifts before Christmas, I always recall the ghosts of Christmas ponies past.

Instead of the real deal we bought her Breyer model horses, and she acted out whatever fantasies girls have about horses without the need to clean stalls or shell out money for hay bales.

Now that my little girl has little girls of her own, she hasn't lost interest in horses. Her house is well stocked with horses.

Just how many horses? She showed me four sweaters and blouses, and claimed two pair of socks with horses on them. Miscellaneous items included a horse magnet on the refrigerator, a horse luggage tag, a string of horse lights for the Christmas tree, and a painted horse head over her garage door. Her children are outfitted with stuffed horses, hobby horses, a rocking horse, a toy stable with many horses, and a bewildering array of horse-imprinted clothing.

After rattling off this list, Erin asked, "Do unicorns count?" I said yes. "Well," she replied, "then we're in trouble."

Erin's oldest daughter, Em, is also fascinated with horses, which sometimes manifests itself in peculiar ways. After Em spends a night at our house, we often find horsey pull-toys stabled covertly in cabinets and, like border guards, we have confiscated Playmobil horses stashed in her backpack for the trip home.

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My father was also a horse person, having been one of the last troopers mustered out of the U.S. cavalry. I grew up with a Shetland pony and other horses. When my father died I acquired a couple of paint-by-numbers horse portraits my brother and I labored over during our preteen years. I passed them on to Erin with a similar painting by a friend. Thrilled, she hung them on her walls.

Last week I stopped by Erin's house and found a half-completed paint-by-numbers portrait of a horse perched on a stool in the middle of her living room. She had started the painting three years ago but hadn't had time to finish it because the twins were born ... three years ago. Now the dynamic duo is going to preschool, giving mom some breathing room. She's hellbent on finishing the painting, even though this will be the fourth paint-by-numbers horse mounted on her walls.

When Erin let me into the house, no fillies were visible, but they could be heard. Soon Em, the 5-year-old, trotted upstairs and spotted the painting. Her little sisters were supposed to be napping. But they busted out of their bedroom and immediately gravitated towards the painting.

Paint-by-number horse portraits all look alike. This one had enough numbers filled in to resemble a horse. The girls stroked its mane and patted its patchwork muzzle until I distracted them with an apple.

Later, in the twins' bedroom, I noticed wavy gouge marks carved into the footboard of one of the wooden bedsteads. Erin saw me staring at the gouges. She told me the twins had been thumping and giggling the night before so she'd walked in to quiet them. Swinging the door open in the dark, she dimly observed one of the little imps -- who was hunched over and gnawing on the end of her bed like North America's largest rodent -- turn to her sister and say, "No, do it like this."

Erin flicked on the light and put an immediate stop to the lesson. "It was wrong," she told me, "on so many levels."

Plenty of animals, like beavers and moose, eat wood. It's called lignophagia. Horses don't eat wood. Nevertheless, anyone who has spent much time around horses knows about cribbing, an inappropriate behavioral pattern that involves biting a fence rail or stall.

I told my wife Lisa the whole story later that night, describing the marks scored into the wood by baby teeth and Erin's utter disbelief as she reined the pair in. Then I segued into another story, beginning in the Dark Ages, where the ultimate gag line was going to be "beavers."

I recounted that as late as the 7th century, Isidore of Seville, the first Christian to compile an encyclopedia, believed that whatever women saw or imagined "in the extreme heat of desire, when they are conceiving, is the sort of progeny they will bear." Isidore, and no doubt many of his contemporaries, believed if a woman saw an animal during pregnancy her child would acquire one or more characteristics of that animal.

Because of Isidore's seminal attempt to document everything ever known, Pope John Paul II declared him the patron saint of the Internet. In other words, don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

I had ignored one essential element of storytelling. Before launching into the story, I hadn't conceived of a reason why Erin might have fixated on a beaver during the arc of her last pregnancy.

Lisa listened patiently, but before I could deliver my punch line, she said, "Too many horses."

Rick Sinnott is a former Alaska Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist.

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com or click here to submit via any web browser.

Rick Sinnott

Rick Sinnott is a former Alaska Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist. Email him: rickjsinnott@gmail.com

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