This story begins, as many of the best tales do, with the arrival of a dog.

Early in the pandemic, Loren Long and his wife, Tracy, rescued Charlie, a tricolor hound with baleful eyes and a foghorn howl. He had energy to burn, so Long started running with him on a stretch of the Little Miami Scenic Trail, which meanders nearly 78 miles from Springfield, Ohio, to Cincinnati.

Along their daily route, the pair passed an abandoned, rusted-out school bus moldering at the far end of a field. The faded yellow blended into a dense camouflage of trunks and leaves, but something about the bus caught Long’s eye.

He took a closer look. “I thought, Hm. That doesn’t belong there,” he said.

He returned the next day. And the day after that.

“I’m running along, and I’m like, Somehow that bus seems happy,” Long said. “I thought, How is she happy? She’s not supposed to be abandoned in a paddock, sinking into mud, with rust all over her and goats climbing in and out.”

Long has illustrated best-selling children’s books by Barack Obama, Madonna and Amanda Gorman. He created Otis, the plucky red tractor who starred in six widely-read picture books and a show on Apple TV+. He’s been struck by bolts of inspiration before, but this one landed differently.