Balto

In January 1925 a doctor in Nome diagnosed diphtheria in a town of about fourteen hundred people with the harbour frozen, the aircraft of the day unable to fly in that cold, and the nearest antitoxin a thousand miles away in Anchorage. Serum went by rail to Nenana, and from there it could only go by dog. Twenty mushers and about a hundred and fifty dogs ran it in relay across 674 miles in five and a half days, through a blizzard and temperatures near minus fifty. Balto was a freight dog, not a racer, and he led Gunnar Kaasen's team on the last two legs into town. The wind took the sled over at one point and spilled the serum cylinder into the snow, and Kaasen dug for it bare-handed. For much of the run he could not see the dogs in front of him and left the trail to Balto entirely. They reached Front Street at half past five in the morning on 2 February. Not a single ampoule was broken. The newspapers gave the run to the dog at the front of the last team, and Balto became famous in a way that Togo, who had run five times as far, never quite forgave the press for. Fame did not keep him: he and the team ended up in a Los Angeles dime museum until a Cleveland businessman found them, and the city raised the money to buy them out in a public subscription of dimes. He lived his last six years at Brookside Zoo and is mounted at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Loved by · Gunnar Kaasen

Honours

• 1925Led the last 53 miles of the serum run into Nome, arriving 2 February
• 1925Statue unveiled in Central Park, New York, in December — “Endurance · Fidelity · Intelligence”
• 1927Bought out of a dime museum by the people of Cleveland, funded in dimes by schoolchildren
• 1933Mounted and displayed at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Their kind

A Chukchi sled dog from north-eastern Siberia, bred to pull light loads over long distances on very little food, and to sleep out in weather that kills.

A life in seasons