## The Cat, Vic: The Expedition’s Other Survivor
The expedition cat Victoria — known as Vic — is a figure in the story who tends to be mentioned in passing and treated as a footnote. The cat survived the full expedition alongside Ada and was rescued with her in August 1923.
The cat’s survival is not incidental to Ada’s. The company of an animal in conditions of extreme human isolation is not nothing. People in solitary confinement report that access to an animal companion changes the psychological texture of the experience. Ada’s months alone after Knight’s death — the months from late June to late August 1923, in which no other human was present — were months in which Vic was there.
Vic also had practical functions. Cats on ships and in camps were kept partly for their role in managing rodents. On Wrangel Island, the cat’s practical function was probably less important than the company it provided, but the company was real.
When the Donaldson arrived and Ada was rescued, Vic came too. The headline of this article retains the qualifier “human” in “sole human survivor” specifically because of Vic. Both survived. Both were rescued. The cat’s survival is the specific fact that the word “human” acknowledges.
## Recognition, Delayed and Partial
The Alaska Legislature’s citation in 1983, issued about a month after Ada Blackjack’s death, described her heroism as having “gone unnoticed for so many years.” The description was accurate.
She had survived an expedition that killed four men. She had done it through two years of increasingly difficult conditions, the last months of them alone. She had been publicly accused, after her return, of contributing to one of those deaths. The accusation was refuted by the dead man’s own father and was retracted by the person who had made it. She had spoken to the Los Angeles Times in her own defense and provided the primary first-person account of what had happened on the island.