When best friends Fern, a bear, and Otto, a cat, go searching for an exciting story in the forest, they have different ideas about what that means. Fern thinks they should stop and watch a race between a tortoise and a hare, but Otto worries that a tortoise is too slow to be exciting. Fern thinks listening to the three brothers talking about how to build a house is incredibly interesting, but Otto isn't convinced. Along the way, the two friends meet a little girl in red who is off to visit her grandmother, a cranky girl complaining that her porridge isn't the right temperature, and many others. But it's not until they run into a big scary witch that they can both agree: this is not the kind of excitement they had in mind.