The accounts’ consistent mention of religious practice as a sustaining element of her survival is consistent with what we know about the psychology of long-term isolation.

The structure of daily prayer and Bible reading would have provided a rhythm to time that otherwise had no structure.

The theological framework within which the experience could be interpreted — as ordeal, as test, as opportunity for spiritual purification — would have provided meaning to suffering that otherwise had none.

The purposeful activity of hunting and maintaining shelter would have provided what psychologists call a “locus of control” — the sense that one’s actions have consequences and that one has some agency in one’s own situation.

The hunting trips, however dangerous, were also breaks from the confined space of the shelter and from the mental loop of accumulated grief.