The Teddy Bear, the ship Stefansson had arranged, was turned back by the ice.

The group waited through the summer of 1922.

No ship appeared on the horizon.

By that autumn, the situation had changed fundamentally.

The supplies they had arrived with were largely exhausted.

The game on the island had proven less abundant than Stefansson had predicted.

And Lorne Knight, the most experienced Arctic hand in the group, was showing alarming signs of scurvy — the vitamin C deficiency disease that had killed polar explorers for centuries, the disease whose symptoms progressed from fatigue and aching joints to skin lesions, bleeding gums, loosening teeth, and eventually death.

The winter of 1922-23 was a crisis from which only one person would emerge.