stefansson-wrangel-09-34-010

and sleeves hanging loose, looking across thirty-odd miles
of ice-free water with gentle winds and sunshine all about
the ship and no logical reason, then, to feel fear.

Somebody said the island was nearly the size
of Jamaica, a name she may have heard in geography lessons
at the mission school but which was only a name, without
meaning to her. But when somebody else said it was eighty
miles long, that did mean something because eighty miles
could be more than ten days’ journey by dog-sled. This was
a very big island indeed. One of the boys, the only one who
was older than Knight and even he was not yet thirty, said
he had been on the island once, years before, shipwrecked
for six months. He said driftwood for fuel and drift-timber
for building a camp was abundant, and game was plentiful,
ducks and geese, fox and seal and polar boar, and oven some
walrus. With the supplies they had brought from Nome, this
guaranteed their comfort until a ship came for them the next
autumn, all the boys were sure of that and she should have
been sure, too.

Yet that day, seeing the island for the first
time, her stomach knotted and the back of her neck prickled
and under her yellow birdskin shirt she had started to perspire.
It had nothing to do with logic or reason. What lay there on
the horizon was the Unknown, and suddenly she had been afraid.

“25 th.

I didn't go out today, it's blowing hard and I
work on beads and it's about two third of felt
work end I open can of tea large tea this evening.

26th.

I was over to the traps today and fox has been
in kold oil can traps and trap was sprung but