Not because of luck or individual heroism alone — though both were real — but because of what four thousand years of careful, empirical, community-based adaptation had made possible in her.

When she walked off the Donaldson and back into the world she had come from, she was carrying that inheritance forward.

It had been tested in the most extreme possible terms.

It had been sufficient.

It was always going to be sufficient.

The Arctic had been testing it for thousands of years before any Western explorer thought to venture there.

The record it had compiled was unbroken.