stefansson-wrangel-09-32-038v

280 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

February 14th: "Feel a little better to-day. I have
a better appetite than yesterday and ate quite a feed.”

February 15th: “The woman went to a few of the
traps. No luck. A very large bear had come from the
east some time during the night and had passed a quarter
of a mile north of camp, going west. He stopped and
smelled a few fox traps and then went on. The woman
says the tracks are the largest she has ever seen. Just our
luck that he had to go by at night, and still it gives us
a little hope.”

We are omitting the repeated descriptions of symptoms
and their progress, for these are chiefly of interest to
the medical profession and will be available to them
elsewhere, as stated above.

On February 16th there is a long description of symp-
toms ending with “all I need is meat.”

It is doubtless the progress of the scurvy, a recognized
symptom of which is gloom and irritability, that leads
Knight on February 17th to express his first annoyance
with the Eskimo woman. In this connection it must also
be remembered that we have outside evidence that Ada
Blackjack herself was at this period ill, with some of
the symptoms at least similar to Knight’s own. That
she should get scurvy from the same food as Knight did
is not strange, since her being an Eskimo would not
protect her if her diet was deficient in underdone fresh
meat. This has been shown repeatedly in arctic Alaska.
The Eskimos there are never known to have had the
disease when living on their own food, but many have
had it and some have died from it when living among
white people who also had scurvy or when they were for
any reason induced or compelled to subsist mainly on
groceries.