stefansson-wrangel-09-32-043v

290 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

of polar bears,¹⁰ which has come down since the days be-
fore firearms when a bear had to be killed at close quarters
sometimes with bow and arrows, but more frequently
with a spear. Under those conditions polar bears are
dangerous animals. But for a present-day man or woman
who can shoot ducks with a rifle, there is scarcely more
danger in a bear than there is in a duck. Unless cornered
a bear will always flee when wounded. Furthermore, one
who is not frightened and who has the skill to hit a duck
can place a bullet where one shot is fatal. But Ada not
only did not hunt for bears, she fled when she saw
them. It is probable that but for this defect of train-
ing she could have saved Knight’s life, for we know,
partly from Knight’s own experience when I treated him
for a severe case of scurvy in 1917, that [a sufficient quantity of] fresh, underdone
meat will produce a rapid recovery.

All this is on the assumption that Knight died of
scurvy. But this is not quite clear. He himself men-
tions in the diary frequently that the symptoms were dif-
ferent from the ones he had before. It seems as likely
that the disease was nephritis, in which case a polar bear
more or less might not have made any difference.¹¹

When the Donaldson arrived at Wrangel Island August
20th, Ada Blackjack had mastered her environment so
far that it seems likely she could have lived there another
year, although the isolation would have been a dreadful

¹⁰See Ada Blackjack’s own dictated story in the appendix and the character
sketch by her friend Mrs. Inglis Fletcher.

¹¹ It was after this was written that Mr. Harold Noice returned to Mr. J. I.
Knight, as related elsewhere, the various papers he had withheld from us
until then. Among these we found as a separate document a short description
of his symptoms written by Lorne Knight on the basis of an article on scurvy
which he had found in a medical book that was in the expedition library.
This description makes it seem more probable that the disease really was
scurvy, although, as pointed out elsewhere, Lorne Knight himself seems to
have concluded later that it was not scurvy—as we can see from the fact
that when birds and eggs came in the spring he ate the meat boiled and the