She bolted from the cable car like a dog that had been cooped up indoors for too long. Her tongue and ears didn't quite waggle around like my dogs' when the scent of the woods hits their snouts.
But she ran with dogged purpose, racing off-road over the rocks and roots on top of Table Mountain, in the same way I've seen my hounds do when chasing after a squirrel in Tokai forest - eyes on the tail, not the trail.
She ran with force and conviction, despite her not knowing the land. Despite our having warned her about the wild African animals in this town. The baboons. The snakes. The rock rabbits. The circling crows. The sharks.
It's probably not a nice thing for an adult to tell an eight-year-old in a new country, but this was her first time on a mountain.
Southampton, England, the home she'd known all her life, was an ocean away. We had to make sure she understood: Africa is not for sissies.
"Law one of the mountain," we told her, "is stay on the trail."
But her canine side was frothing and she sprinted to the very nearest cliff edge, walkways and other tourists be damned. (Side note: It's ok, I can compare her to a wild dog. She's my cousin. Family rule.)
We watched her ignore signs and railings and loose shoelaces and the icy gusts of wind within the shifting table cloth of clouds. We watched her lure dassies with pretend food, by rubbing the tips of her tiny fingers together, to get a closer look at the wild rabbit creature.
"Dassies need no encouragement; they're quite happy to come up and bite your nose off," I told her.
Everything was new to her and instead of being afraid, instead of heeding caution and wise elders, she tugged on Superman's cape, spat into the wind, and pulled the cloak off the old lone ranger. To quote Jim Croce.
She had all the chutzpah of the Shih Tzu and stubborn energy of a Labrador in a rock pool. And she saw more of the top of Table Mountain that day than many locals do in their lifetimes.
In her runabout, the little wolf spied a lone red-winged starling, a crow having a go at fallen human snacks and a neatly-packed cairn of rocks atop a boulder. With each sighting, and with a great sprint and leap, she would soar into the air and land almost on top of her target. The starling flittered off, the crow leapt back at her and the cairns came crashing down.
Realising there was no stopping the chaos, I quickly diverted my gaze to the sky and uttered a phrase I was to repeat several times during her stay with us, "Oh, the weather is changing isn't it. Best we head off."
But in all the fret and guilt of careering after her, I'll admit that I saw new corners and angles of a mountain I thought I knew like the tops of my trail shoes. As well as a few cliffs I could have done without, but, even so, I felt it. Her energy, her unstoppable curiosity, the certainty and deep joy of a child running wild in the great outdoors.
Sometimes it takes an eight-year-old, or a Labrador, to remind us of that, to dare us to trespass and to lope where others fear to lope - outside the lines. That said, I'm still not entirely against leashes for children...