A couple of years ago, I went to a talk by Benedict Allen, who had gone dog sledging in North Easter Russia. He said that the couldn't pronounce the names of the dogs he was given, and so came up with his own names for them. The moment I discovered that I was going to get four dogs, I decided that they were going to be named after four officers on The Morning, Scott's relief ship in 1902/3. The two lead dogs should have been Colbeck and Doorly, but when I same them, they just didn't fit – and at first they didn't even seem to have any obvious distinguishing character. The wheel dogs, though, did seem to fit. The big dog might have been more of an engine than an engineer, but I found myself comfortable calling him Morrison. The smaller, white dog, seemed gloriously self-confident and Evans – later second in command of Scott's second expedition – seemed a good fit too. As the week progressed, I decided the dog on heat, who I had learned was called Baloo, should be Hussy – though not Hussey, Shackleton's photographer in the Endurance – and the quietest of the four kind of ended up Lady, though I was also thinking of Wallflower.
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On the last night, Per Thore told us that the theme he used for naming his dogs was, in fact, characters from Disney movies. Hence, Baloo was from the Jungle Book. Not all the dogs were his, though, and so the other lead dog was Inuik, for the place in Northern Canada. The white dog was named Haiku. These two names seemed to fit the dogs really well, and I wished I'd known them earlier. The final dog was called Corvu – or something like it - which is apparently in The Lion King, but I can't work out whether I misheard Per Thore or whether some of the names are different in the Norwegian version. In any case, I'd learned during the week that this dog was also known as Tractor, from his character, and I agreed it was a perfect description for him.