She came home to her son.

She lived her life in the north.

She died at eighty-five in a state that had, by then, recognized Alaska Natives as the first peoples of the land.

The moccasins she sewed on Wrangel Island — the pair she was making for Bennett across the months of her isolation — were real.

Whether Bennett wore them is not recorded.

But the making of them was the most human possible expression of why she survived: not survival for its own sake, not survival as competition or conquest, but survival as the means of returning to someone who needed her.

Her ancestors had built the knowledge that made survival possible.