So who's Top Dog in Siberia?

TV viewers have seen BBC explorer Benedict Allen make his way through deserts and rainforests. But he wanted to do a journey nobody is recorded as ever having done - cross the frozen Bering Strait by dog sledge. Here he tells how he was defeated by freak weather - but won something worth more in personal satisfaction ...

Siberia is the back of beyond, but Chukodka is the back of beyond of Siberia. This place is so remote the locals call the rest of Russia 'the mainland' - as if their particular patch of tundra were an island.

And it might as well be, because Moscow is nine time zones away. Even the other Siberians feel sorry for people in this neck of the woods. In Chukodka, the size of Germany and France combined, there isn't one substantial tree.

With impeccable timing, I'd chosen to do a dog trek through this far north-eastern pocket of Siberia in the worst winter in living memory.

Even back in London's Shepherds Bush, I learnt whole villages had been lost under snow, whole limbs lost to frostbite.

By the time I got to Heathrow, I'd almost given up hope of crossing the Bering Strait from Russia to Alaska. Its ice bridge, not permanent for the last ten years anyway, was no doubt blown apart by severe wind and currents.

Now, just to reach the Strait, a journey of 1,000 meandering miles from the provincial capital Anadyr, would be a triumph.

But I did cling to one further dream - to have, by my journey's end, mastered my dog team enough to at least head out into the Strait alone.

It was weeks before there was a long enough gap between blizzards even for me to reach my dog team. Then the owner was caught in a snow drift. He couldn't make the rendezvous to teach me either the dogs' names, or - rather more worryingly, I felt - the commands they'd respond to.

The good news was, according to local hunter Yasha, that even had I known the commands for 'left' and 'right' the dogs wouldn't listen to a stranger anyway. 'You must win their hearts by feeding them,' was his advice.

With his boot, he prodded the curled ball of snow which was one of the lead dogs. 'But never give them food by hand - they'll take that as well.'

Yasha, who was a Chukchi, a native group meaning 'reindeer herders', looked over my 10 dogs lying in pairs in front of the sledge. They were nested deep in the snow, totally oblivious to us. Not even a muzzle was raised to inspect us as we stood there - it would be a waste of heat and energy. They weren't doing anything for anyone until their master turned up.

Did I mention that the temperature was perhaps minus 40 centigrade? My first task, then, was to shift the fierce loyalty of the dog pack away from their owner. And this meant making it clear that I, and no-one else, was now the provider.

'Now they'll begin sizing you up,' Yasha said, after I'd done my first feeding session and almost lost my fingers both to the dogs and the cold. 'They've realised you may be useful.'

I spent the next few days learning from Yasha, who'd had his own team since he was five, just how tough the Chukodka Sledge Dog is - even by the standards of that most proficient of all Arctic operators, the husky.

Good for them meant frozen walrus meat, water meant a chew at the ice. Keeping warm didn't mean retreating to a kennel, it meant just curling tighter into the snow.

The day we first tested the dogs on the frozen bay I sat on the sledge trying to anchor it with an ice spike while Yasha, his mate Toila and translator Misha all struggled to line up my team.

The dogs - now hysterical at the prospect of a Siberian version of 'walkies' - can travel 60 or so miles a day while lugging a 650lb load of seal meat. With just me on the sledge, it was almost impossible to hold them back.

We accelerated off, Yasha and Toila shepherding my dogs away from thin ice with their own teams. Then my dogs decided to chase to a stray mutt, coordinating their efforts in a way they had utterly failed to do until now.

I hung on, hurtling helplessly towards the white horizon. It was a white-knuckle ride - literally. And with not enough blood getting to my fingers I already knew I had frostbite.

My dogs came to a halt only when they began fighting among themselves. By then, I had severe frost damage on five finger tips.

It could have been worse. Yasha's 12-dog team once chased an Arctic hare out across thin ice and all drowned in seconds as they tangled in the freezing water.

I might reasonably have expected a week off to let my fingers recover somewhat. But then we had a spell of clear weather, a balmy minus 30. 'Fine conditions are much rarer than frostbite in the Arctic,' Yasha said. We were off, it seemed.

I was venturing into a hostile environment without even knowing my dogs. All any of us knew was that the front dogs must be the leaders.

One of these I felt inspired to call Top Dog. He shied away from humans but must have had some sort of mysterious doggy charisma because the other dogs copied almost everything he did.

However, he was only ever relaxed if beside Flashy White, a huge beast that acted like his minder - and wouldn't let me near him. Flashy White was beautiful, but, I rather feared, dim.

The rest of the team was still a mystery as we set off north towards the first destination, a remote coastal settlement some three days away.

Hour upon hour we slid over frozen sea or rolling tundra.

It was a place of barren beauty and potential death. Left alone in rainforest, you might last a week or two, in a hot desert a couple of days. Here, if you crashed through the ice into the sea your heart might stop in seconds.

Sometimes Yasha would unexpectedly stop his team and shout, in the screaming wind that, as it was 'only minus 20', we should stop to have something to eat.

The 'something' always turned out to be raw walrus from the dogs' food sacks. It was a fishy flesh which, during its storage in the frozen ground since the summer, had ripened in patches to an unsightly green colour. Even in a blizzard you could smell it.

The alternative was a slab of raw seal or whale. Whale was the one to go for. Though it looked like a piece of car tyre, the inch of fat was sweet and the flesh like beef.

These were early days - after a month, our flesh shrinking as we burnt calories keeping warm, I'd be craving green walrus.

At nightfall, we pitched our tent, and even the Chukchis lay awake wiggling their toes to stop frostbite.

We reached a settlement - one of the desperate remnants of Stalin's policy of herding together Chukchi and Yupik 'Eskimo' communities. Now abandoned by the outside world, they hadn't had visitors for eight months - that is, since the beginning of winter.

With no petrol and no spare parts, the native populations were having to take up their grandparents' lifestyle based around the dog. Strays were being rounded up and tried out in dog teams. Loyal pets being taken out into the cold and put into harness.

There were others living out on the tundra - the reindeer herders with only their deer and prowling Arctic wolves for company.

Their life had remained as it ever was, one of mutual dependence. The herders gave the deer protection, and in return got from the deer food, clothing, shelter and products to barter for lamp oil - seal fat from coastal Innuits.

Seeing these fellow humans around a camp fire, cosy even in a blizzard, was reassuring. Soon I'd be alone with my dogs, having to make a go of the Arctic myself.

After a month's travelling, my dogs actually began to listen to my commands. This is not to say they understood them. When I shouted 'Tahhhtei,' which meant 'left!' Top Dog would go left, Flashy White go right and all others would hope they would be doing the right thing by keeping straight on.

But I now knew the team. Jeremy, in the middle, was the intellectual and best at sorting a route through buckled sea ice. However, he would do nothing without his old friend Bumbling Bernard who didn't actually do any pulling at all.

The rear dogs, Dennis and Mutley, were the strongest, and took the strain of the sledge. According to Yasha, they'd live 12 or 13 years - that was two years longer than a lead dog.

The likes of poor Top Dog, it seems, were continually anxious about what they might encounter. Wolves, bears or that most deadly Arctic substance - water. The leaders were the stressed business executives of the dog world.

The dogs' different qualities became that much more apparent when, after some two months travel, we reached Lorino, Yasha's home near the Bering Strait.

Here, I launched off alone with my team with enough walrus meat to last us 10 days. And though it was already clear that it we wouldn't get very far through all the mashed-up ice of the Strait, I felt the sense of freedom of a sailor setting out in his own boat. For better or worse, we were tackling the world on its own terms.

This feeling became noticeably less uplifting as dark fell.

As I pitched my tent, the dogs began to howl, a rare use of precious energy. Then I saw the reason - a shape flitting between the huge, raised blocks of ice which had been thrown up by the formidable currents below us. Wolves?

I didn't have a gun, but fired off a distress flare to encourage whatever it was to think twice.

My fear was not so much of an attack from desperate bears or wolves, but that my dogs might run off home. Even now, less than 20 miles out, I'd never get back without their help.

In the morning, I found polar bear and wolf tracks threading right past the camp. In fear, the dogs had chewed through their ropes to huddle together. But not one of them had left me.

The loyalty of the dogs was stretched further when, three or four days later, I actually managed to lose them. I'd gone forward on foot to find a way through the maze of jumbled ice, and turned back to find my tracks erased by the wind.

I hunted around, alarm slowly mounting. I knew they were within two hundred paces of me. But unless I found them and my sledge with all our provisions within a day, we would all die.

Then I discovered that my emergency stove - placed around my waist as part of my survival kit - had dirty petrol in. Now, I couldn't even melt ice to drink. And I was well aware that it was not just cold but dehydration that fatally weakened Captain Scott.

As it happened, the weather that night was kind - minus 15. I created an igloo from the ice blocks around me and began my search again at first light.The dogs were just 20 paces away.

They had been patiently waiting for me as usual, no doubt all day and night listening to their master's usual blundering antics.

It was soon after that I gave up my attempt to cross the Strait. I had achieved, I felt, something much more important. Nowadays my dogs would even follow my scent, weaving through the ice to follow where ever I had gone ahead to scout on foot.

It was time to turn back. These 10 dogs were no longer animals to me, but more like professional colleagues. The least I could do was to get them back safely. With all the satisfaction and also neurosis of a newly appointed Top Dog, I turned the team for home.

? Benedict Allen's six-part series Ice Dogs starts 19 March at 7.30pm on BBC2 and at 7.30pm on Friday in Scotland.