In the jungle, morning always began with birdsong and the smell of fresh leaves.
But this morning, there was an unusual silence around the Animal Detectives’ little house.
The anteater Alfred sat in a chair on the porch with a cup of herbal tea and watched Kuba, who was sleeping in a hammock with a faint smile on his face.
“Sleep well, captain,” Alfred murmured softly. “Your dream is not over yet.”
## Chapter 1 – We set off east
On Wild Boar Island, the sun was breaking through the thick tree canopies, spilling golden patches onto the muddy path. Kuba walked in front, wearing his blue captain’s coat with epaulettes and his pirate hat with the anchor, stepping forward with confidence. Behind him, Zofia stretched her long neck to see what lay ahead. Ruda Panda walked at the side, sniffing the air. Ala fluttered between the trees, up and down, up and down. The mouse Patrycja ran beside Kuba with a magnifying glass pressed to one eye, studying every inch of the path. And Tuptuś—a little rabbit in glasses, carrying a large bag full of books—trotted at the back, carefully writing down every step in his notebook.
“According to the drawing on the lid of the box,” said Zofia, glancing at the map, “we’re going east.”
“East is that way,” Kuba said, pointing confidently to the left.
“East is that way,” Zofia said calmly, pointing to the right.
Kuba grunted and turned right.
Along the way, clues began to appear. At a fork in the path—twigs arranged into an arrow. By the bridge over the stream—a stone with a carved line. Near a huge root—a feather stuck into the ground, pointing toward a hill.
“Someone is leaving us signs,” muttered Ruda Panda.
“Someone is helping us,” said Patrycja, pressing her magnifying glass to the stone with the carved line. “Or luring us. This cut is fresh—made only a few hours ago.”
Tuptuś didn’t look up from his notebook.
“One does not exclude the other,” he replied matter-of-factly.
Ala flew high above the treetops. From there, she saw a hill with three dark rocks. And something else—something shining. Once. Twice. Three times. Like a mirror in the sun.
“Something is flashing there!” she called, swooping down. “Beyond the hill, in the shadow of the trees!”
Everyone hurried faster.
## Chapter 2 – Two paths
At the foot of the hill, the path split in two.
To the right, a clear arrow made of thick twigs pointed the way—big, obvious, impossible to miss.
To the left, there were barely visible tracks in the mud. As if someone had walked very carefully, placing each paw gently.
Kuba stopped and narrowed his eyes.
“The arrow,” he said confidently. “Someone left it for us. We go right.”
Patrycja was already kneeling by the muddy tracks, magnifying glass at her eye.
“Wait,” she said without looking up. “These left-hand tracks are deeper at the toes. Someone was in a hurry. Running. And look—there are three paw prints close together, as if someone stopped and looked around.”
“A big arrow in the pirates’ forest?” Ruda Panda muttered, frowning. “That’s suspicious.”
Tuptuś stopped writing. He removed his glasses, wiped them, put them back on, and opened one of his books.
“In old pirate books there is a rule,” he said thoughtfully. “A big track is a trap. A small track is the truth.”
Everyone turned to stare at him.
“Tuptuś!” said Kuba. “Why didn’t you say that earlier?!”
“You didn’t ask,” Tuptuś replied, closing the book.
Kuba took a deep breath.
“Left,” he said firmly. “Follow the small tracks. We go…”
And just then Tuptuś tripped on a root.
His bag flew forward. Tuptuś flew after the bag. He bumped into Kuba. Kuba bumped into Zofia. Zofia wobbled her long neck. Ruda Panda jumped aside—and landed right on the twig arrow.
…to the right.
For a split second everyone stood perfectly still.
“Maybe right after all?” Ala asked timidly from a branch.
“Right,” Kuba sighed.
Tuptuś got up from the ground, adjusted his glasses, and reached for his notebook.
“I’m writing this down,” he said gently. “We made the correct decision. Although the execution could use some improvement.”
## Chapter 3 – The trap
They followed the right-hand path. Ten steps. Twenty. Thirty.
The ground beneath their feet rustled strangely.
Zofia managed to say, “These aren’t leaves, they are…”
MUNCH. CRACK. DARKNESS.
A deep pit, hidden under leaves. The six friends sat at the bottom and looked up. Above their heads—a net, tightly tied to the trees.
Ala spread her wings and flew up—and stopped immediately just beneath the net.
Zofia stretched her neck as high as she could; the tip of her nose nearly touched the mesh.
Kuba tried climbing the pit walls. They were smooth and crumbly. Impossible to scale.
Patrycja examined the walls with her magnifying glass, then the net, then the ground beneath their feet.
“Planned in advance,” she said with precision. “The walls were deliberately smoothed. The net is secured at four points. Someone prepared this.”
Ruda Panda walked around the pit, looking for some kind of foothold. Nothing.
Tuptuś took out his notebook.
“2:30 p.m.,” he said expressionlessly. “We have fallen into a trap. Smooth walls. Escape impossible. Net too strong. Mood—moderately bad.”
“Tuptuś,” said Kuba very calmly, “are you really taking notes right now?”
“Documentation is always important,” Tuptuś replied. “Especially in difficult moments.”
Silence fell.
No one had an idea.
## Chapter 4 – Szakal Szymon
A head appeared over the edge of the pit.
An elegant head, with neatly combed whiskers and a red vest with brass buttons. Szakal Szymon. The same Szakal who had tried to steal Mikołaj’s compass the year before.
The same one who later tried to sell the jungle residents magical seeds that, he promised, would grow full trees in winter. The seeds turned out to be ordinary pits with no value.
Beside him stood another head. Red fur, green eyes. Lis Laurenty. He stayed silent.
He looked at the detectives in a strange way—not triumphantly, not cruelly. As if he wanted to say sorry, but didn’t know how.
“Dear pirates… detectives… whatever you are,” said Szakal Szymon smoothly, “you don’t need to stay down there. It’s very simple. Tuptuś comes out, deciphers one little page from the book for me… and we all go home.”
He pulled an old leather book with a worn crest from his bag. Tuptuś, who had been sitting quietly in the corner of the pit, looked up and froze.
“The Stolen Book of Potions,” he whispered, quickly writing something in his notebook.
“I only want one potion,” Szakal continued, as if discussing the weather. “The one that makes everyone treat me like a king. Just one recipe. That’s not much, is it?”
Tuptuś stood up. He was small—barely reaching Kuba’s knee. But at that moment he seemed very serious.
“I promised my great-grandmother,” he said softly but clearly, “that I would never reveal a cipher for a bad purpose.”
“I won’t do it!”
Szakal Szymon shrugged.
“You have provisions for two days. We have more. We’ll wait.”
The net stayed. Szakal left.
Lis Laurenty didn’t move right away. He stood at the edge of the pit for a moment longer.
And then, very carefully, he dropped a small stone into the pit. On the stone was a carved symbol—the very same one that had been on the lid of the box.
He winked.
Then he disappeared among the trees.
Kuba picked up the stone and stared at the sign for a long time.
“What does that mean?” he muttered. “Is Laurenty helping us? Or is this another trick from Szakal?”
Patrycja took the stone and examined it through her magnifying glass.
“The symbol is fresh. Scratched with a sharp tool, by a steady hand. Someone planned this—it wasn’t an accident.”
“We don’t know,” said Ruda Panda. “And that’s the worst part.”
## Chapter 5 – Night in the pit
The night in the pit was long.
Zofia counted stars through the net so she wouldn’t fall asleep. Ruda Panda curled into a ball. Ala sat on Kuba’s shoulder and every now and then tugged his ear so he wouldn’t doze off.
Patrycja, by the light of a small lantern, went through her notes from the whole day, searching for something she might have missed. Tuptuś read quietly, from time to time scribbling in his notebook.
Kuba looked at the stone with the symbol and thought. The same sign as on the lid of the box. Laurenty had touched it before dropping the stone into the pit. He had winked. He had walked away.
Why would someone on the wrong side wink at those he had just trapped?
Kuba didn’t know the answer. But he felt the answer was already somewhere nearby—waiting to be found.
Near dawn Tuptuś put his book down.
“I feel sorry for you,” he said quietly. “I’ll try to buy us some time. I’ll pretend to decipher it. I’ll mutter things, turn pages, write symbols. That should give us a few hours.”
“And what will we use them for?” Kuba asked.
Patrycja closed her notebook and looked at the stone with the symbol.
“Maybe someone already knows we’re here,” she said calmly.
## Chapter 6 – Panther Agata
In the morning, Szakal Szymon returned with a ladder and a wide smile.
Tuptuś climbed out of the pit with a serious expression on his face. He sat on a rock, opened the book, and began to mutter, trace lines across the pages, frown, and nod solemnly. Szakal stood beside him and kept craning his neck to peek over his shoulder.
“Well? What do you see?”
“Hush,” said Tuptuś. “The cipher requires concentration.”
Szakal stepped back and waited impatiently, shifting from one foot to the other. One minute. Two. Three.
“Well?” he asked.
“Hush.”
Szakal narrowed his eyes. He started circling Tuptuś slowly, like a hawk. Tuptuś didn’t look up. He wrote. He muttered. He turned pages.
Szakal leaned in closer.
And just then—without the slightest warning—the branches above Szakal’s head rustled.
A black figure dropped silently from above, like a shadow.
Pantera Agata landed behind Szakal, grabbed him by the collar of his red vest, and before he could make a sound—he was already falling down.
PLOP.
For a moment, everything was completely silent.
Then Szakal Szymon’s outraged voice rose from the pit:
“This is illegal!”
Zofia, Patrycja, Ruda Panda, and Ala climbed up the ladder. Kuba came out last, then lifted the ladder away with one swift motion.
He looked down and said very calmly:
“Mr. Szymon. The pit is deep, the walls are smooth, and the ladder, as you can see, is no longer hanging here. Please sit quietly and wait. Someone will come through eventually.”
An indignant snort came from below.
“Mikołaj’s compass was illegal too,” Kuba replied, adjusting his hat. “And so were the fake seeds. This time, just sit and think.”
He turned to the team.
“Let’s go.”
## Chapter 7 – Lis Laurenty’s story
Everyone turned to Agata.
“Where did you come from?” Patrycja asked.
“Lis Laurenty sent a signal,” Agata said. “With a mirror flash. To me and Alfred on the ship. Three times. It was the agreed sign. He told me to wait beyond the hill.”
“Laurenty?” said Ruda Panda in disbelief. “The one who was standing beside Szakal?”
“The same,” Agata confirmed. “But he was the one who carved the clues on the lid of the box. So you’d know which direction to go. And he was the one who left those small tracks to the left—intentionally uneven, like someone fleeing—so you would avoid the trap.”
Kuba was silent for a moment.
“But we followed the arrow,” he said at last.
“Because of that root,” Tuptuś added very softly, without lifting his eyes.
Patrycja opened her notebook and pointed to her notes.
“I knew something didn’t fit. The symbol on the box, the mark on the stone by the river—the same style. The same hand. Someone had been leaving us clues from the very beginning.”
“Then why was he with Szakal at all?” Zofia asked.
Agata opened her mouth to answer.
Kuba raised a paw and said:
“Let’s find Laurenty and go to the ship. He should explain it himself. Where is he?”
And just then Kuba heard Alfred’s voice. He stood nearby with a cup of tea, beside Kuba’s hammock, waking from his nap back at the detectives’ house.
## Chapter 8 – Kuba wakes up
“What did he say?” Alfred asked. “You were talking in your sleep.”
Kuba opened his eyes. The hammock swayed lazily. The sun was already high.
“That’s exactly what I don’t know,” Kuba said with slight frustration. “The dream ended.”
Alfred nodded solemnly and took a sip of tea.
“You were talking in your sleep about going back to the ship,” Patrycja added.
“Something interrupted my sleep too today,” Alfred said after a moment. “I dreamed I was fishing through a hole in the ice in the Arctic. Ice, silence, peace. Lovely. And then—one polar bear on one side, two penguins on the other.”
“Penguins in the Arctic?” Kuba asked in surprise.
“In the dream, yes. But polar bears live at the North Pole, in the Arctic. And penguins live at the South Pole, in Antarctica. They’re separated by almost the whole world—they would never meet,” Alfred replied calmly. “But maybe that dream will return one day. And this time I’ll learn something.”
Kuba looked at him for a long moment.
“Alfred,” he said slowly, “in my dream Agata was on the island. But Agata stayed on the ship with you. How is that possible?”
Alfred set down his cup very carefully.
“Agata told me her dream before you even woke up,” he said. “And it was… very similar to what I heard from you.”
They looked at each other for a long time.
And in the jungle, the birds kept singing as if nothing had happened.
“In the next episode, we’ll explain everything to you. About the dreams, about Lis Laurenty, what happened to the book of potions—and maybe what became of Szakal Szymon.”
Good night.