But the wilderness soon gave her its hardest test. In January, the temperature plunged to nearly sixty below. Frost coated the walls of her crude shelter, and every breath turned to vapor.
Even with a constant fire, the cold was brutal. On the third day of that deep freeze, Nina developed a harsh barking cough. By evening she was shaking with fever.
By tapping her own chest and listening to her breathing, she diagnosed bilateral pneumonia. Alone in the woods, without proper antibiotics, it was close to a death sentence. Weak and burning up, she lay under hides in the freezing shelter and understood how absurd it would be to survive everything else only to die there.
Then, in a fever haze, she heard her late father’s voice as clearly as if he were standing beside her. He had always said that in the backcountry, only fools give up. The memory was enough to get her moving.
Staggering, she brewed a powerful tea from dried Labrador tea and thyme. For three days she forced it down along with tart berries. By the fifth day, the fever began to break and the cough eased.
A week later, gaunt but alive, she stepped outside and drew in the cold air. She understood then that she could not afford weakness or mistakes. She needed a real shelter, serious food stores, and a working forest pharmacy.
When spring came, she began digging a new dugout with a fire-hardened stake. Building it took months of exhausting labor. The roof was insulated with birch bark, thick moss, and packed earth.
At the heart of the home was a clever stove built from smooth creek stones and clay. It held heat well even in the worst cold. Later she added a separate cold cellar for food storage.
Creating a garden in poor forest soil required patience and ingenuity. She used wood ash to cut the acidity and rabbit droppings for fertilizer. From the few potatoes she had carried in, she managed to establish a reliable crop.
She even learned to obtain salt from natural mineral licks used by animals. She filtered the salty clay and evaporated it down to gray crystals. Her store-bought clothes eventually wore out and were replaced by carefully tanned hides.
From rabbit fur she made warm pants, a loose shirt, and a hooded outer layer. She used dried sinew for thread because it was so strong. Over time, her little homestead ran with remarkable efficiency, supplying fish, meat, mushrooms, and vegetables.
To keep track of time, she cut a mark into a log each day. She recorded medical observations on sheets of birch bark using fish oil as a writing medium. Over the years she filled twelve handmade notebooks with notes on herbs and treatment methods…
