Barry

#1: G
INGER

#2: B
UDDY

#3: B
ARRY

The author and editor would like to thank Marc Nussbaumer, curator, Natural History Museum, Bern, Switzerland, for his assistance in the preparation of this book.

L
ITTLE
B
EAR

My name is Barry der Menschenretter. That’s MEN-shun-RET-tuh. A big name, you say? Well, in life, I was a big dog. If you want to see me with your own eyes, go to the Natural History Museum in Bern, Switzerland. There you will see my stuffed body in a glass case. I apologize in advance for my appearance. They repaired me and patched me and added fur and stuffing in 1923, raising my head to show me in a less humble pose. In spite of all their
efforts, I no longer look very much like myself. But perhaps you can see something of the original dog in me if you look carefully and imagine.

I come from a long line of big dogs called mastiffs. Mastiffs marched and fought with the Roman army in ancient times. Even before that, there were mastiffs in a faraway place called Tibet. In modern times, my kind of mastiff is called a Saint Bernard, but in the year 1800, when my story begins, there were no such things as Saint Bernards. Dogs such as I were called
Alpenhunde
, a German word that means “dogs of the Alps”—the high mountain range in Switzerland, a country in western Europe. People also called us butchers’ dogs, perhaps because we ate so much meat every day that only a butcher could afford to keep us.

But the most common name for us dogs was bari.
Bari
means “little bear” in Swiss German.
That’s what my name means: Little Bear. With my thick fur and big, padded feet—like a bear—I was well suited to living in the cold.

The place in the Alps where I lived is so high there is snow on the ground almost all year long. It is 8,000 feet above sea level. During your time, people have learned to master the snow. They plow through it in vehicles with special wheels and shovels. They fly over it in silver birds called airplanes. They even play in it, sliding down it on sleds and on skinny sticks called skis. In my lifetime, before special vehicles or skis, snow was a very serious matter. In fact, where I came from, people called snow the White Death.

Today, there is a tunnel bored through solid rock that is a shortcut from one side of the Alps to the other. But in my day, there was no tunnel. People who needed to get from Switzerland to
Italy had to climb over the Alps on foot or ride on mules. When the steep mountains got buried in snow, the going became difficult—and sometimes impossible. Almost as bad as the snow were the swirling banks of fog. People froze. They got lost. They got buried alive in avalanches.

What is an avalanche? An avalanche is a great big spill of snow, rocks, and ice that comes thundering down a mountainside as if some giant has sent it tumbling. Avalanches are unpredictable things and have many causes. Sometimes when the temperature rises there is a sudden thaw, causing wet, heavy snow to slide. Other times, a new layer of fresh snow slips down the face of an older layer of snow. However it comes about, if you happen to be standing in the way of an avalanche, you are out of luck. There is no time to escape.

That is where we baris came in. Our job was
to guide the lost, to warm up the frozen, and to find those buried alive. In my lifetime, they say I rescued over forty travelers from the White Death. They say I was a hero. But I say I simply loved the snow. I loved to walk in it. I loved to roll in it. I loved to search for people buried under it. If it is heroic to do what you love—and to do it well—then I guess I was a hero. But I prefer to think of myself as a Dog at Home in the Snow.

Let me tell you a bit about my home. It was a big, plain stone building called the Great Saint Bernard Hospice. In those days, a hospice was a place where weary travelers could stop and rest before moving on. My particular hospice was named after Bernard de Menthon, the cleric who founded it almost one thousand years before I was born. A cleric is a man of the church who has taken a vow to help people. Bernard’s special mission
was to help travelers in their trek along the steep mountain paths—to guide them when they were lost and to feed them and warm them when they were hungry and cold.

In those days long ago when Bernard was still alive, people who crossed the mountains had to deal not just with snow, but with robbers, too. Bernard believed travelers should have shelter from the weather and protection from robbers. For hundreds of years, the clerics of the Great Saint Bernard Hospice carried out the wishes of their founder. But it was only in the 1700s that we baris arrived at the mountain.

Baris came to live at the hospice when some noblemen gave us as gifts to the clerics. It was lonely and desolate up there. Not many people wanted to live in such a high, windblown, snowy place. The noblemen thought the clerics could
use the company. One of the things we baris are very good at is snuggling. We are big dogs with big hearts. We also make very good guard dogs, not because we are vicious, but because we are big and discouraging to robbers.