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I met 7-year-old Emily on my second and last day at Anthony’s Lagoon Cattle Station, during a 4x4 road trip from Cairns to Darwin along the remote Savannah Way. As with the other kids I met during my journey across the Australian Outback, there was definitely something special and precocious about her, and Emily was about to stamp that feeling in my heart. While helping Sophie, a German backpacker working at the station, feeding the orphan calves in a barren spot outside the fences of the property, this little green-eyed angel appears out of nowhere, wearing a cute pink school uniform and a heart-melting smile. Sophie helps out with the introductions and gets back to nurturing the calves. Emily looks at me sideways, with a mischievous smile, grabs my hand, and pulls me assertively, shouting: “come on, let’s go”. I find myself being towed by this small child into the barren fields of the outback. She runs, jumps, ducks, sits, gets up and runs some more. Playing with the wild plants, she picks up a flower and gives it to me. And then she runs again, hides behind a shed and shows up from the other side with a loud scream, hugging me in a jump. We travel through the Cattle Station at the rhythm of her innocence, absorbing everything as if we were in the world of Narnia. Inside the warehouse, she pushes me into a tractor, sits in front of me, and screams: “full speed ahead, Sir”. In the short course of an afternoon we become athletes, cowboys, pirates, pilots, and artists, traveling by sea, land and beyond. The station becomes a gigantic playground and I’m in for the ride. When we start running along the airstrip of the station, “Come On”, her dog, joins the play. We pretend to be planes... taking off, gliding and landing, feeling the warm wind of the Savannah in our arms. “Come On” runs behind us, happy to be part of the play. Suddenly he runs into the bushes and comes back with a dead snake between his teeth. Emily grabs the snake with a frown and insists in a proper burial. I dig a hole while Emily catches some wild flowers to sprinkle over the grave. We stay there for a while, looking at the burial site in silence, and then we start going back at a leisurely pace, looking down at our shadows moving in the ground. Then she looks up at me, a small tear dropping from her eye, and faintly whispers: “will you be back?”. I don’t know what to say, so I smile. She stares at me long enough to fill uncomfortable then sits in one of the lanes of the airstrip, looking down. “Can we take a picture together?", she asks. I nod and immediately position the camera on the ground, set the timer for 10 seconds and sit beside her. Just before the shutter triggers, Emily embraces me in the tightest hug ever. The photo lives now in the album of my greatest memories.