Blair Braverman

It's early fall and Ada goes to the port of Nome to meet the ship.

Rumors have been flying all around town and people have figured out now that the expedition is going to a place called Wrangell Island, which is a pretty large uninhabited island that is full of polar bears.

It's north of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean.

It's about 90 miles long end to end.

No bars there at all.

No partying.

Polar bears and birds.

The goal of the expedition is that they're going to go overwinter there, which means that a ship is going to drop off the crew and they'll just live off the land until next summer.

And then someone's going to come pick them up again.

There's a couple points.

Sometimes these expeditions are for biological research.

A lot of times they're for claiming land.

We're going to get into that a little bit later in the story, whether this expedition actually has a point or not.

Ada gets onto the ship and she realizes there's no other native people there.

Oh, good.

They lied to her or at least they didn't lie to her because a native family had signed on.

But they they decided not to come.

They didn't show up.

And at this point, Ada doesn't know what to do.

There are only four other members of the expedition.