8. Please think in silence,

Consider, a rare case:

A squirrel sat on a pine,

On the very middle branch.

Then jumped up by five,

Then descended by seven.

(You all should remember,

As in a class lesson.)

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## Then the agile squirrel once again

Jumped up by four,

Then by nine more

And sat at the very top.

Sitting and looking from the height

At stumps, birches, and bushes.

And how many branches the pine has,

We should calculate together.
8. From the middle branch to the upper one, there will be $+5-7+4+9=11$ branches. Therefore, the total number of branches is $11 \cdot 2+1=23$.