An adventure story

Last summer, my brother, Juan, and I were staying at our grandfather's house in Mexico. When he was young, our grandfather was an explorer. One day, we were looking at his old books and we found a crumpled map hidden between the pages of a book called Animals of Mexico. On the map there were directions to a secret place, deep in the forest.

Juan wanted to follow the map. 'Perhaps we'll find some treasure!' he said excitedly.

We set off early the next morning. The twisting path marked on the map took us deeper and deeper into the forest. The tall trees blocked the sunlight, so it was very dark. The forest was surprisingly noisy – birds screeched and screamed, insects hummed, twigs and branches snapped under our feet. Suddenly, we heard a fierce growl.

Out of the shadows crept a huge, wild, spotted cat.

'It's a jaguar,' I whispered as quietly as I could.

Juan froze with fear. My heart was beating really fast, but I calmly looked the jaguar straight in the eyes and tried not to show how terrified I was.

'Back away, slowly,' I whispered to Juan.

We walked backwards, very, very slowly. The jaguar took one last look at us, then turned and disappeared back into the darkness.

Juan's hands were shaking as he looked again at the map.

'We're here!' he said. 'This is Grandpa's secret place.'

As we turned around, we saw a small, wooden cabin.

We nervously opened the door and went inside. On the walls, there were photos of beautiful jaguars, like the one we had seen.

Still trembling with fear after our adventure, we began to realise that we had in fact found a treasure – a place where jaguars live in the wild.