Ginger noticed the footprints on a morning when she wasn't looking for anything at all.

She had gone outside just after breakfast, when the day was still cool and the sunlight hadn't yet climbed over everything. The night before, a little rain had fallen, not enough to make puddles, but enough to soften the dirt along the alley behind the house.

That was where she saw them. Footprints.

Ginger stopped.

They were small. Smaller than her shoes, but bigger than a bird's feet. Each print had four little toes and a round pad in the middle.

Ginger crouched down. "Well," she said, "somebody has been here."

The footprints crossed the path and disappeared behind a clump of tall grass. That was all it took. Ginger forgot where she had been going. She followed them.

On the other side of the grass, the prints appeared again, marching neatly through the damp earth. One. Two. Three. Four.

They passed beneath a bush where a spiderweb sparkled with drops of water. They went around a flat gray rock. They crossed a patch of weeds.

Ginger followed every one. She tried to guess who had made them. "A cat?" She studied the prints. "Maybe." But what would a cat be doing wandering around here in the middle of the night? "A fox?" That sounded much more interesting. Ginger imagined a little red fox slipping through the darkness while everyone slept.

Then she had another thought. "What if it's something nobody has discovered yet?" That was better still. Ginger hurried after the trail. The footprints led toward an old wooden fence. She expected them to pass underneath it. They didn't. Instead, they turned. Ginger turned too.

They followed the fence for several yards and then headed toward a patch of bare ground. Ginger slowed down.

There were dozens of footprints there. They went left. Then right. Then around in a circle.

Ginger stood in the middle of them, trying to understand what had happened. "Maybe there were two of you," she whispered. She searched for a second set of tracks. There weren't any. Just the same little footprints wandering around and around.

Then suddenly they headed off again. Ginger followed. Now she was certain there had to be something at the end.

A burrow. A hidden nest. A secret hiding place. Maybe even a tiny doorway beneath a rock.

The footprints crossed another stretch of damp ground. Then another. And then, they stopped.

Ginger blinked. She looked ahead. Nothing. She looked to the left. Nothing. She looked to the right. Nothing. She walked around the spot carefully, searching for another print. There wasn't one. The footprints simply ended.

Ginger put her hands on her hips. "Footprints can't just stop." She searched farther out. Still nothing. She checked beneath the bushes. Nothing. She looked behind the rocks. Nothing.

Finally, Ginger returned to the very last footprint and crouched beside it. There it was. Four tiny toes. One little pad. And beyond it, perfectly smooth earth.

Ginger looked up. A branch stretched overhead. "Hmmm." She looked at the footprint again. Then at the branch. Then higher into the tree. Something moved among the leaves.

Ginger froze. A pair of bright eyes looked down at her. Then came a flick of a striped tail.

Ginger laughed. "A raccoon!" The little raccoon stared at her as though Ginger were the one behaving strangely. "You climbed the tree!"

The mystery wasn't quite as mysterious anymore. But Ginger wasn't disappointed.

She sat beneath the tree and looked back at the long trail she had followed. The footprints hadn't gone nowhere after all.

They had gone around rocks and beneath bushes. They had wandered beside the fence and turned circles in the dirt. They had led Ginger somewhere she hadn't planned to go and made an ordinary morning feel like an adventure.

Eventually the raccoon climbed higher until Ginger could no longer see him. She stood and brushed the dirt from her knees.

On the way home, she followed the footprints backward. But they looked different now.

Before, each one had been a question. Now each one was part of a story.

Ginger decided that mysteries were funny that way. Sometimes the most interesting thing wasn't what you found at the end. Sometimes it was all the places the questions took you while you were trying to find the answer.