Dawn had only just licked the dew off Pumpkinbridge Meadow when Otis found the first tiny footprints in the pumpkin patch. He stood beside a round orange pumpkin and lowered his gray nose to the earth. The prints were so small they looked like scratches at first — little toe marks in the soft dirt, and a trail of half-eaten pumpkin leaves behind them. Otis flicked one nicked ear and followed the line with careful amber eyes.
“Too small for a barn cat,” he murmured. “Too neat for a crow.”
The tracks curled between the vines, then slipped past a bent fence post and pointed straight toward the red barn. That would have been simple enough, except Lena was already there on the path, her sandy ears tipped forward, and Mara was peeking up from a pumpkin stem, twitching with excitement.
“Otis!” Lena called. “Look at these marks! I saw them first—”
“I saw them before you said that,” Mara chirped, climbing onto a leaf. “And I think they belong to something important.”
Otis did not answer right away. He bent lower, trying to study the prints before the talk began. But now Lena had hopped closer, Mara was circling the trail, and the tiny tracks kept going, straight and sure, all the way to the barn door. Otis could see that much clearly now. The mystery was not in the pumpkin leaves alone. It was waiting at the barn entrance, quiet as a held breath, and he had to decide what to do with the door in front of him.
What happens next?
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