Both the group period and the solitary period were remarkable. The group period included the early hostility, the failed resupply, the departure of three men for a crossing that killed them, and five months of caring for a dying man while also feeding herself. The solitary period included everything the account of July and August 1923 describes.
The cumulative weight of all of it — from September 15, 1921, to August 19, 1923, roughly twenty-three months of increasingly difficult survival — is what makes the story what it is. Any attempt to reduce it to a single dramatic set-piece misses the actual character of the experience: the accumulation of difficulty, the constant adaptation, the sustained effort across an extended period without relief.
Two months alone at the end of twenty-three months of increasing hardship is not a lesser achievement because the twenty-three months contained a group. The group, by the end of it, had consisted of one very ill man who could not hunt or help with the physical demands of the camp, and who blamed her for his condition while she tried to keep him alive. The aloneness of those five months of caregiving was, in certain respects, more complete than the aloneness of the two months after his death.
## What She Made for Bennett: The Beaded Slippers
Among the items that the accounts of Ada Blackjack’s time on Wrangel Island mention is a pair of beaded slippers that she made for Bennett. She was making them during the months she was alone on the island, working the beads into a pattern that she was designing for her son, who was in a children’s home in Nome undergoing treatment for tuberculosis.