She had devoted a decade to caring for Lucy the Chimpanzee. But in an instant, Janis Carter knew her friend no longer needed her.
Lucy gave her a cuddle then swiftly turned and rejoined the other chimps to head off into the Gambian jungle.
Recalling the day for a new documentary, emotional Janis says: "We groomed each other and talked, then she grabbed me and pulled me really tight.
"It was very intense, it was not like any other embrace we had had.
"Lucy still loved me, that was very, very clear, but she didn't need me in the way she had for so many years."
Janis, now 70, had spent more than six extraordinary years in the Gambian rainforest - with almost no human contact - teaching Lucy to be wild.
It was as a 25-year-old student in 1976 that she had her first life-changing meeting with the chimp, who was raised as a human in an experiment by psychotherapist Maurice Temerlin and his family in the US.
She was there to clean the cages but Janis and Lucy clicked, so much so her new pal trusted her above her owners.
"She asked me to groom her," Janis said. "It was a very special moment for me. It was our moment."
Once Janis started to go inside Lucy's cage the pair began to talk in sign language.
Lucy knew 120 signs, slept on a human bed, and could serve tea to guests.
But she soon became too big - and too destructive - for the home.
When Maurice and his wife Jane decided to send her to her natural habitat in Gambia in 1977, Janis went along too.
The process was expected to take weeks and the Temerlins returned home after a fortnight. But Janis never left.
First Lucy lived in the Abuko nature reserve, but she was slow to learn the laws of the jungle.
© Lucy knew 120 signs, slept on a human bed, and could serve tea to guestsLucy knew 120 signs, slept on a human bed, and could serve tea to guests
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When she was moved to a remote island uninhabited by humans in May 1979, Janis decided to go along too.
For her own safety from local leopards and hippos she slept in a cage alongside Lucy and eight other chimps. Despite no electricity or running water and letters arriving only every six months, Janis stayed for more than six years.
Being forced to decide whether to leave her pal suddenly made her "aware of the depth of my feeling for Lucy".
With no training, Janis says she learned through "trial and error" adding: "Whatever I'd thought the chimp would have done I would try to do that myself."
She had left behind her boyfriend and a career as a teacher, and it was tough.
Janis says: "I did think to myself, Jesus what am I doing? I did advertise for somebody to work for me and a couple of people answered.
"Neither got out of the boat on the jetty- the chimps just went nuts. This was a stranger to our little world, and they didn't want anyone there at all.
"That left me, alone, completely alone with them. There was no one that could take over in my absence. They fulfilled all those human needs that I had for social contact.
"Lucy and I had more of a friendship. My feelings for Dash [another chimp] it was more mother-offspring. I don't know if I ever became a chimp so to speak. But I do think our personalities and cultural tendencies all met together at some point."
But the loneliness and slow progress took an increasing toll and at one stage Janis collapsed. When she came around she saw Lucy eating leaves, having at last followed Janis's foraging example.
"Lucy knew me very well, she was sensitive to moods," she says. "It was perhaps a breaking point for her that she had to give in." But there was more to do otherwise Lucy "couldn't have survived" without Janis.
"She had to integrate socially with the chimps but wanted all her emotional needs met by me.
"So I had to withdraw for her to feel empty to the point she would look to someone else to fulfill those needs."
It worked and months later a horror encounter with a "pumped-up" Dash convinced Janis it was time to leave.
"He was like bouncing on his toes," she says. "I was gonna get it that day.
"I was leader, but he was the oldest male, so it was inevitable he was going to take over. He charged me... grabbed my leg and dragged me everywhere."
Janis returned to the site for one more visit a year later, before that heartfelt final embrace from Lucy.
"At the end of it, she just got up turned around, and walked back to the other chimps," Janis recalls.
"It had been so hard for so long, I just never thought she would walk away from me, but Lucy had finally made it, which is what we all wanted."
Lucy died the following year in 1987, but Janis remained in the region.
There is now a chimp sanctuary on the Gambian islands where 140 of the endangered animals running freely.
Lucy, the Human Chimp airs on Channel 4 on Monday night at 9pm.