MISQUAH — A cooler left behind at the Loon Lake landing over the holiday weekend was reunited with its owner this week after what the Sheriff’s substation described as “an unusually thorough identification process,” the claimant establishing ownership by naming three items inside and then, unprompted, criticizing the mustard.

The cooler had sat at the landing for two days, prompting a call to the substation from a resident who suspected it had been forgotten and worried, vaguely, about what might be in it. Deputy Vang collected it, confirmed its contents were “leftover and harmless,” and held it at the fire hall pending a claim, which arrived promptly once word got around, as word does. “Finding the owner of a cooler is never the hard part here,” Vang said. “The hard part is the other thing.”

The claimant, asked to identify the cooler’s contents before taking possession — a standard precaution against the town’s occasional cooler opportunist — named the three items correctly and then volunteered, with feeling, that the mustard inside was “the yellow kind, which I did not buy and do not endorse,” blaming its presence on a brother-in-law. “That’s when I knew it was his,” Vang said. “Nobody criticizes mustard they’re not related to.”

The cooler was returned, mustard included, and the matter closed. Vang used the occasion to repeat the substation’s gentle annual reminder that personal property at the landing should be labeled, a reminder he conceded “nobody follows, because labeling your cooler would take all the drama out of losing it, and the drama, around here, is half of why we have coolers.”