Animals in conditions of human solitude and distress are not nothing. People who have described solitary confinement, shipwreck, and other forms of extreme isolation have consistently reported that the presence of a living thing — a plant, a bird, an insect, and certainly a cat — changes the psychological texture of the experience in ways that are hard to quantify but that survivors consistently recognize as significant.
Vic survived on Wrangel Island on the same basic terms as Ada: by eating what was available. Arctic foxes, birds, eggs, whatever the island and the camp provided. The cat’s survival through two Arctic winters is itself not nothing — the conditions that killed four humans did not kill the cat, which suggests that the camp maintained conditions in which at least minimal survival was possible throughout.
When the Donaldson arrived and Ada was rescued, Vic was brought aboard as well. The cat came home from Wrangel Island, which makes Vic, technically and precisely, the other survivor of the Wrangel Island expedition of 1921-1923.
The headline for this article retains the qualifier “human” because Vic’s presence is part of the factual record and because precision matters. Ada Blackjack was the sole human survivor. She was not the sole survivor. Vic was there, and Vic made it.
## The Camp Ada Maintained: Infrastructure of Survival
After Knight died in June 1923, Ada was managing a camp that had been built for five people and had been reduced, over the months since January, to the equipment and structures that one person could use and maintain.