When she described catching foxes, she counted them with the precision of someone who understood that the count mattered — that those numbers represented the food that was keeping her and Knight alive.

When she described learning to shoot, she recorded both the attempt and the success with the same matter-of-fact tone, neither dramatizing the achievement nor dismissing it.

When she described caring for Knight, she wrote without sentimentality about what the work actually required: the bedpan, the sand heated for his feet, the food she prepared and brought him, the reading she did to pass the hours of his decline.

And she wrote, in one diary entry, the most economical and devastating summary of what she had actually been required to do: