Much of the plot centers on Miyax’s struggle to survive in the Alaskan wilderness. The novel defines this struggle immediately by describing her lost on the North Slope, desperately trying to find food. During the sections in which Miyax is in the wilderness, food symbolizes her struggle for survival. The novel’s descriptions of food encapsulate both the precariousness of Miyax’s situation and the surprising richness of the wilderness that she loves.

The urgency of Miyax’s need to find food is suggested when the narrator notes that a “dull pain seized her stomach” (14). Her search for food drives Part 1 of the novel, and she is overjoyed when she finally convinces the wolves to share some with her, exclaiming, “I’ll live! I’ll live!” (33). When the pack shares a caribou carcass with her, Miyax gleefully eats the organs raw, and before that she ate “the warm viscera” of an owlet, calling them “the nuts and candy of the Arctic” (46).  Even after Miyax gains her footing in the wilderness, with the help of the wolf pack, the search for food is intimately connected to her survival. This is clearest in a climactic scene in which Jello raids her camp and steals food from the underground cellar she carefully built.