MISQUAH — Everything at the library is ready except the one thing that cannot be got ready. The certificates are lettered, in green ink, with the capital S receiving the attention it was told to receive. The ice cream is ordered in a quantity that Megan Tollefson describes as “not a close call.” Forty-one names are on the list — the record class, up from thirty-four last summer, every one of them having climbed some distance up a hand-drawn ladder of animals that a woman invented in 2003 because a boy told her reading was not a sport.

The finale is Friday, August 28, at 2 p.m. Tiers will be called from the bottom up, which is how she has always done it, so that the youngest readers get the room’s full attention before anyone is tired. The top tiers will be presented, doctors permitting, by Ruth Aune.

Above the eagle — the top of the ladder for twenty-three years — there is now a blank panel of paper, taped up two weeks ago and untouched since. Brynn Solberg, who is nine and who has read past the top of the ladder, has been in twice to look at it and has not asked what will go there, which Tollefson considers the most restrained behavior of the child’s life.

What goes there will be drawn at the finale, in front of everybody, by the woman who drew all the others. She has not said what it will be. She has said, on the telephone, twice, that she knows, and both times declined to elaborate beyond confirming that it is an animal, that it is not a moose — the moose tier having been established in June for entirely separate reasons — and that Brynn should not try to guess it because “she will guess it, and then I will have to change it, and I don’t want to change it.”

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