She was starving on an Arctic island, alone, dealing with a body that was showing signs of scurvy, surrounded by polar bears, waiting for a ship that might not come.

And she was sewing moccasins for her son.

The child in the Nome orphanage was the reason she had come to Wrangel Island in the first place.

He was the reason she had taught herself to shoot and trap and build boats.

He was the reason she had endured Knight’s cruelty without breaking.

The moccasins were the physical expression of that reason — the evidence, stitched into animal skin with the same careful hands that had kept her alive, that she intended to walk off this island and back to her child.

She also experimented with the expedition’s photographic equipment during her solitary weeks, taking pictures of herself standing outside the camp.