MISQUAH — Ruth Aune returned to the Misquah Public Library Friday afternoon at 1:53, seven minutes before the summer reading finale, carrying a green pen in one hand and correcting the placement of a returned book with the other before she had taken off her sweater.

Forty-one children and enough parents to move the chairs twice were in the children’s corner. When Mrs. Aune came through the door, everybody stood up.

“Sit down,” she said. “You’ll frighten the books.”

It was her first full program at the library since early July. The library has not published details of her illness and this newspaper has not asked for them. What is public is that she has been librarian here since 1994, that Megan Tollefson has been minding the desk through most of the summer, and that for eight weeks Mrs. Aune has been asking for the reading numbers by telephone and objecting, from a distance, to any crooked rung on the hand-drawn animal ladder.

The ladder began the summer with the tiers Mrs. Aune invented in 2003 and acquired new rungs as the record class of readers outgrew it. Moose, pike and elk were added in June. An eagle went up in July. During smoke week the library added its first rung in ink because the children kept reading indoors while the sky was borrowed. Three weeks ago, when children reached the top again, a blank sheet was taped above the eagle and nobody was told what belonged there.

Friday, after the certificates had been handed out from the bottom up, Mrs. Aune pulled a chair to the wall, sat down, uncapped the green pen and drew a loon.

It took about a minute.

Brynn Solberg, who had been specifically instructed not to guess the animal in advance, covered her mouth with both hands. Her mother said afterward this was because Brynn had guessed it in the car and understood the terms of the instruction.

Asked why a loon, Mrs. Aune looked at the drawing for a while before answering.

“Because they leave,” she said. “And because they come back.”

Megan Tollefson said the room went quiet enough at that point to hear the circulation desk clock. She had spent the morning lining up forty-one certificates in reading-tier order, all signed in green ink, with the names checked twice because “Mrs. Aune notices names before she notices anything else.”

Seven readers reached the eagle tier by Friday. Three read beyond the chart far enough that Mrs. Aune wrote their names beneath the new loon. Brynn was one of them. Mrs. Aune declined to call that a victory and corrected a parent who did.

“The chart is not a race,” she said. “It is a ladder. Ladders are for getting somewhere you could not reach before.”

The program itself lasted forty-six minutes. Children were called forward by tier, received a certificate and a small badge, and were sent back to their chairs before the next group was called. The youngest finisher required help spelling his last name. The oldest had already checked out another book before the program ended. The ice cream, donated and stored in the Northern Tap’s walk-in until Friday morning, survived both summer heat and the town’s earlier bear experience and was gone by 2:47.

Dale Brandt, Lakeside superintendent, attended from the back wall and said the reading record matters more to the district than the number itself suggests.

“Forty-one children is not a huge program in a city,” Brandt said. “Here it means families drove in from every direction, week after week, and a library with one children’s room kept inventing more wall because the kids kept needing it.”

Ben Aune, Ruth’s grandson, stopped in after baseball work at the school and stood near the circulation desk. He said he had been told not to make a fuss over his grandmother’s return and had complied “to the best of my ability.”

The library’s official summer-reading count closes at forty-one, up from twenty-nine two summers ago. Megan Tollefson said the ladder will stay up through September because the staff has learned not to take down something children are still pointing at.

Mrs. Aune stayed until 3:16. She sat when she wanted to sit, corrected two returned books, asked whether the fall story-time schedule had been posted and left after putting the green pen in the top drawer of the circulation desk.

Megan Tollefson will continue handling most day-to-day hours while Mrs. Aune eases back into work on her own schedule. No formal return date has been announced.

The loon remains above the eagle.