The accounts of Marie Dorion’s winter survival journey focus necessarily on the physical: the horse, the knives, the hides, the food that ran out and had to be replaced.

These are the documented details, the things that contemporaries noted and that historians have repeated.

But the survival of two young children through three months of Blue Mountain winter required more than physical supplies.

Children who are cold enough will not move.

Children who are hungry enough will not cooperate.

Children who are frightened enough will stop doing the things that are necessary for survival and start doing the things that are necessary for consolation, which are not always the same things.

Managing two young children through an extended crisis situation while simultaneously finding food, building shelter, navigating terrain, and making all the decisions required for survival is a challenge of a different order from managing it alone.