Barry

He worked at the hospice on the Great St Bernard Pass between 1800 and 1812, at 8,100 feet on the road between Switzerland and Italy, where the monks had kept dogs for a century to walk the route after storms. The dogs went out in pairs, found people under fresh snow by scent, dug them out, and lay across them while one of the pair went back for the monks. He is credited with more than forty lives. The best-known story — a boy found frozen in an ice cavern, warmed until he woke, and carried down on the dog's back — cannot be confirmed, and the brandy barrel was invented by an English painter in 1820. What the hospice records do show is a dog with an unusual instinct for coming weather, who went out ahead of the monks and was sent for when someone was overdue. He was retired down to Bern in 1812 and died there two years later. His body was preserved, and he has been on display at the Natural History Museum of Bern ever since — remounted in 1923 to a shape closer to the dog he actually was. There has been a dog named Barry at the hospice from that day to this.

Honours

• 1800–1812Credited with more than forty people brought alive out of the snow of the pass
• 1814Preserved; still displayed at the Natural History Museum of Bern
• · Monument at the Cimetière des Chiens, Asnières-sur-Seine, shows him carrying a child
• · A dog at the Great St Bernard Hospice has been named Barry ever since

Their kind

Bred at the Great St Bernard Hospice from Alpine mastiff stock for weight, scenting ability and a tolerance for deep snow — a rescue dog before the phrase existed.

A life in seasons