## Learning to Hunt: The Skills She Acquired on the Island
Ada Blackjack arrived on Wrangel Island as a seamstress. She left as a woman who had trapped foxes, shot seabirds and seals, built two boats, maintained a camp alone through two months of Arctic summer, and kept herself alive through resourcefulness and continuous work.
The gap between those two descriptions is the gap that the middle period of her time on the island fills — the months during which she acquired, under pressure and out of necessity, a set of skills she had not previously needed.
She learned to use a rifle. The expedition had brought firearms, and the men had been the ones who used them for hunting through the first year and into the second. Ada had not been expected to hunt; she had been expected to cook what they brought her. When the men left and Knight was too ill to shoot, she had no choice but to learn.
Learning to shoot is not a simple matter of picking up a firearm and pulling the trigger. It requires understanding the mechanics of the weapon, managing recoil, learning to aim accurately, learning to read the behavior of animals well enough to get into position for a shot, and then doing all of this in the specific conditions of the Arctic — in cold that affects both the equipment and the shooter, in terrain that offers limited cover, in light conditions that can be challenging. Ada learned all of this, without a teacher, on an island where failure meant she did not eat.