Barry (9 page)

“Barry,” he said, “there is a kind and gentle man from down in the valley. He has heard of your
plight. He has said he will take you to live with him.”

Why was I leaving the hospice?

“Don’t look so worried, Barry. He has a beautiful house and I am sure you will be very happy there.”

I didn’t understand what was happening, but I did understand this one important thing: my days of rescuing travelers were at an end. I, Barry the Rescue Dog, was retiring from active duty.

R
ETIRED FROM
D
UTY

The Gentle Man had traveled through the Great Saint Bernard Pass on several occasions. Each time, he had stayed at the hospice and seen with his own eyes what the rescue dogs did. He had heard stories about me, about the little boy I had saved, and about the bigger boy who had mistaken me for a wolf and tried to kill me. When he learned how badly I had been hurt, he sent word to the clerics that, in exchange for their kindness to him in the
past, he would be happy to take me to live with him.

I traveled down the mountain with some merchants who were on their way to the city of Bern. We traveled at first on foot and then by cart. I was grateful when one of them put up a ramp and told me to climb in the back of the cart. I must admit that my bones creaked and my old wounds ached with every step of that downhill trek. And though the cart jostled me, it delivered me apace to my new home.

How noisy the city was! There were so many people. Far more than I had seen even on the busiest days at the hospice. There were men and women and children. There were horses pulling wagons. In the past, all I had known of the world of people were the hospice and the grounds. Here there was house after house, all looking alike with
a forest of chimneys on top puffing smoke into the sky. There were chapels with bells, and marketplaces filled with wagons and horses and people who were shouting and laughing. And the smells! Hundreds of them wafting in the air. My nose quivered constantly.

We came to a neat stone house, one in a long row of similar-looking houses. It had three front steps and a small porch with a garden in front. A man stepped onto the porch and greeted us.

“Welcome to your new home, Barry,” the Gentle Man said.

I climbed down from the cart and sniffed his hand. He had a good smell. I sniffed around the garden. I lifted my leg and let it be known that this was my home now. I followed the Gentle Man up the stairs and into the house.

The floors of the hospice had been bare stone and wood. Here the floors were of polished wood covered in places with soft woolly rugs. There were soft things to lie and sit on. The Gentle Man said to me, “These are not for dogs. You must not climb up onto the furniture, Barry.”

He need not have worried. The floor had always
been good enough for me. And, besides, with my old bones, I probably could not have made it up onto the furniture, anyway.

The Gentle Man showed me my bowls by the back door, near the kitchen. He fed me right away. I was hungry and thirsty from the journey. The food was good. Fresh meat mixed with meal. The water was clean and cold. Later, the Gentle Man took me out for a walk.

At first, I did not understand why I could not run ahead and lead the way, as I had with the clerics on the mountain paths. But the city was crowded and the streets were confusing. I was glad when the man hooked a leash to my collar and kept me near him. I understood that my place was close to the Gentle Man, at the other end of the leash. There was so much to see on our walk. There was grass and flowers and more trees than I had ever seen
before in a place that the Gentle Man called the Park. There were lots of choice spots in the Park where I could lift my leg and let this city know that Barry now lived there.

There were other big dogs like me in the Park. We approached each other and sniffed carefully.
They smelled like city dogs. There were small dogs riding in carriages on ladies’ laps who saw me and yipped at me so fiercely I had to snort. What did they think they were going to do to me with their tiny little teeth and bodies not much bigger than hares? Tear me limb from limb? There were birds,
too, and long brown things the Gentle Man called squirrels. I had half a mind to chase after them, but there was the leash to hold me back, and, besides, my running days were over. These were my plodding days, and I was at peace with that. They were sitting days, too, and I was content to sit with the Gentle Man while he read his newspaper. He took me to the Park every day.

Many people came to the house to visit with the man. Some of them came just to see me. The Gentle Man would greet them at the door. They would enter the house and approach me where I liked to lie on the woolly rug in the parlor in a shaft of sunlight. Usually the visitor was a mother or a father bringing their children to meet me. They would kneel down and stroke my coat. They would pat my head and offer me treats and coo over me.

“This is the world-famous Barry der Menschenretter,” the parents would explain to their children. There was such pride in their voices. It was as if I were their very own dog.

I bet that you have been wondering all this time what the
Menschenretter
part of my name means. Well, I will tell you, just in case you have not already guessed. It means “lifesaver” in the German tongue. To my visitors, to the world, that was who I was: Barry the Lifesaver.

“He saved forty people,” they said.

“He saved a baby,” they said.

“He saved the clerics from robbers who wanted to steal the silver cross in the chapel,” they said.

I might have saved forty people. Frankly, I did not know. I had long since lost count. But as I have said, by the time I was born, there were not many robbers roaming the Alps. Still, I suppose that is
what happens when you become a legend. People like to tell stories about you, and they don’t always care whether the stories are the exact truth. That was all right with me. I knew who I was and what I had done. I had saved lives. I had rescued people from the White Death. And in the end, I had escaped the White Death myself.

In the Park, the Gentle Man had a favorite bench where he liked to sit and read. Lying stretched out at his feet, I could see beyond the trees of the Park and the city chimneys to the high peaks of the snow-covered Alps. On cloudless days, if I looked very hard, I imagined I could even see the roof of the hospice, glinting in the sunshine. How I missed the hospice. The Gentle Man was good to me, but I missed the clerics and the marronniers and the other working dogs. And, oh, how I missed the snow!

Then one morning, I woke up to see a familiar soft grayness in the sky out the window of my new home. It was not long before they came drifting down from on high, my dear old friends, the snow-flakes. I went to the front door and scratched.

The Gentle Man said, “Would you like to take a walk in the snow, Barry?”

He might have been a new friend, but he already understood me so well. He attached the leash to my collar and together we went out for a walk in the snow. I plodded a little way down the street before I opened my mouth and felt the cold flakes melting on my tongue. I could smell the snow, which lightly covered all the other city scents. Later that afternoon, the Gentle Man took me out again. By that time, the snow in the Park had gotten deep. It was not as deep as the snow in the Great Saint Bernard Pass. But it was deep
enough for my purposes. I went down on my back and rolled in it, just like I had when I was a pup.

I might have been a city dweller, living far away from the place where I was born and had lived most of my life, but I would always be a Dog at Home in the Snow.

Today, dogs like the Saint Bernard and the Great Dane have been bred for size and have reached nearly monstrous proportions for a dog. We know from bones that in ancient times even “big” dogs were not much bigger than a German shepherd. When Roman soldiers crossed the Alps to conquer the people of northern Europe over 2,000 years ago, they left behind what were, for their times, big dogs. These dogs, which the Romans called Molossers (but which we know as mastiffs), had fought side by side with the Roman legions and
were pitted against lions in Rome’s Colosseum. Because these big dogs ate a great deal, only armies and wealthy people could afford to own them.

The Great Saint Bernard Hospice was founded in 1049. No one knows when dogs came to live there, since a fire in 1555 destroyed all records. But there is a painting of a rescue dog hanging on the hospice wall that was done in 1695. The first dogs were probably gifts to the Augustine clerics and the nonreligious workers, known as marronniers. The clerics and marronniers must have led a lonely life in the mountains, and the dogs were probably intended as companions.

But after the dogs settled in they proved their worth as good watchdogs and workers. They helped the clerics haul supplies from the town of Bourg-Saint-Pierre up the mountainside to the hospice. They carried milk and cheese packed on sleds or in
pouches from the stable to the hospice. Most importantly, they showed a talent for guiding people through snow and fog and finding lost travelers. The hospice workers called the dogs
baris
(“little bears” in Swiss German) because of their burliness and their hardiness in the snow. The baris quickly became famous for their rescue work. Although the baris were shown in paintings and newspaper engravings wearing barrels of brandy strapped around their necks, the baris offered the warmth of their bodies, not liquid refreshment, to the travelers they rescued.

In the 1800s, Napoléon marched his army across the Alps. The dogs and hospice workers helped the soldiers as they struggled to haul their cannons over rocky crags and crevices. General Desaix, one of Napoléon’s favorite generals, so admired the bari dogs that when he died in battle,
Napoléon had him buried at the hospice.

The dog known as Barry was born at the hospice in 1800, the year of Napoléon’s crossing. Barry distinguished himself by making more than forty rescues in snow and fog. Accounts of Barry’s exploits vary. Some accounts say that he saved closer to one hundred people. Stories tell how he saved a little girl in the cave instead of a boy. Or that he died when another boy he tried to rescue attacked him with a knife. Barry’s stuffed body can still be seen in the Natural History Museum in Bern. And there is a Barry monument at the dog cemetery near Paris.