What the diary does not contain — despite subsequent accusations — is evidence of negligence toward Knight. The diary record of the months she cared for him shows a woman doing everything she could with the limited resources available. She was hunting, she was cooking, she was nursing, she was building and repairing the camp infrastructure. The gap between what she could do and what Knight needed was a function of the island’s conditions and Knight’s condition, not of her choices.
## Knight’s Death: June 23, 1923
Lorne Knight died on June 23, 1923.
Ada could not bury him. She was not physically capable of digging in the Arctic ground, and the logistics of burial in those conditions would have exceeded what one person with limited tools could accomplish. She did what she could: she built a barricade of wooden boxes around his body, creating a kind of structure to keep animals away from it, and moved herself and her belongings into the storage tent. She moved out of the living space they had shared, for reasons of practicality and probably of something harder to name.
She was now entirely alone, in the specific human sense of the word. Vic, the cat, was still there — the cat had been on the island since the beginning, part of the expedition’s informal company, surviving on what the island and Ada provided. But human company was gone. The three men had left in January. Knight was dead in June. Ada would not see another person until August.