The camp’s physical infrastructure — the tents, the storage areas, the equipment for cooking and hunting and sleeping — represented a specific set of maintenance requirements. Tents in Arctic conditions require regular attention; the wind and cold and moisture of the environment create degradation that goes unmanaged at the camper’s peril. Equipment breaks and needs repair. Food stores need to be managed against loss to moisture, cold, and animals. The camp’s overall spatial organization needs to be adapted to whatever the current conditions and population require.
Ada was doing all of this alone. She was the camp’s maintenance staff, hunting staff, cooking staff, and only human occupant. She was making decisions about what to prioritize and what could wait, what was essential and what was expendable, how to allocate her physical and mental energy across the demands that the camp placed on her.
The wooden box barricade she built around Knight’s body was part of this management: she could not bury him, she could not remove him from the camp, and she needed to prevent the bears and foxes and other animals from disturbing the remains. The solution she devised — the wooden box structure — was the practical response to a practical problem with the materials available.
Her decision to move herself into the storage tent, rather than continue in the main living space she had shared with Knight, was similarly practical in one dimension and something more in another. The living space now contained the death. Moving into the storage tent was a way of continuing to live in a different space, a space that was her own and not shared with what Knight’s death had left behind.