Ada’s diary records her encounters and near-encounters with polar bears as a fact of daily life during the months she was alone. She had built the gun rack above her bed specifically for bear defense. She had built the elevated platform to watch for them. She had shot at bears on at least one occasion, according to the accounts that have survived.
The polar bear is the largest land carnivore on earth. An adult male can weigh between 775 and 1,500 pounds. They are not commonly aggressive toward humans — attacks are not the norm — but they are capable of tremendous violence and they are predatory, and their presence in large numbers around a lone woman’s camp creates a real and persistent danger. Ada’s management of that danger, across the months she was alone, required vigilance and the specific skills she had either brought or acquired.
She had arrived on Wrangel Island unable to shoot. She had learned on the island. The fox trapping she had developed was what kept her fed through much of the winter and into the summer. She understood the bears’ movements well enough to manage her own movements around them. She was not born with Arctic survival skills in some automatic cultural sense — she was Iñupiaq, but Iñupiaq people are not uniformly expert in every Arctic skill any more than any other people are uniformly expert in the range of skills their environments demand. What she brought was the foundation of cultural knowledge, the practical intelligence to learn what the situation required, and the will to keep applying herself to the problem.