Excerpt from Seven Kinds of Water

   When Pavva’s father stopped singing, the fire in the lavvu had almost died out. He was the only one in the family who sang yoiks, and he did not do it very often. Tonight had been special, because he had been singing for a long time and Pavva’s brother was already asleep on his reindeer skin with a worn doll clutched in his hand. His sister Risten was staring into the embers and twirling her long dark hair. Pavva’s mother sat with her legs pulled up, weaving a decorative belt from some colorful yarn. She seemed lost in her listening too, but when the silence lingered after the last yoik, her eyes seemed to come back from some far place. It was as if she returned to her own face. She turned and looked at her husband:

    “You’re such a good yoiker. I hadn’t heard some of those yoiks for a long, long time.”

    “And I hadn’t thought of them for a long time either. Maybe they wanted to be let out into the air again.”

    “Yes, maybe,” she said. “I don’t think I ever heard that last one. What’s it called?”

    “Seven Kinds of Water. It was a yoik my father taught me when I was young.”

    She turned to the children. “Look at your little brother! It’s time to go to sleep now.”

    Risten, who was two and half years older than Pavva, sometimes argued with her mother, especially about going to bed. But tonight she got herself ready without saying anything. It had been an unusual evening that had made her thoughtful.

While his father sang, Pavva had played with two stick figures that fit in the palm of his hand. They looked like hunters, flat on their bellies, scouting for prey. He had made them himself from birch branches and had spent a great deal of time carefully peeling the bark off with his knife. Now they were smooth and brown, and he put them inside his leather pouch. But as soon as he had closed it he thought of his round stones. He had to open it again and reach down to make sure that his four stones were still there. Yes, they were. Pavva closed the pouch again and put it among the branches under his reindeer skin. Tomorrow he would return to the beach to look for more stones.

    When Pavva woke up his father was already gone, and, just as the previous evening, his mother was busy weaving. Both Risten and Little Brother were still asleep. He was in no hurry to get out of bed and looked at the blue sky through the smoke hole. He could hear the wind in the trees, and the squeaking from two tree trunks rubbing against each other. Every now and then gulls cried outside. Pavva knew that if he waited long enough, a bird would pass across that small patch of sky of the smoke hole. He decided that spotting a gull would be a sign to get up. There were no clouds today, and as he waited he lost track of time. But before he even saw the tip of a wing, his mother noticed that he was awake.

    “Good morning snufflebug,” she said softly. “How are you today?”

    “I’m not a snufflebug,” he answered. “I’m not snuffling, and I am definitely not a bug.”

    “How about some breakfast?”

    “Mmm. What is there?”

    “Blueberries and milk, and dried meat too.”

    “I’m tired of dried meat,” he answered. “We have that every day.”

    “Well, that’s true, but your father is out fishing again and maybe he’ll bring some salmon.”

    “There’s no fish any more. That’s what you and Papa keep saying.”

    She did not answer. Instead she told herself to be more careful. From now on she would not say anything about it in front of the children. But she realized that they knew, because it was what everyone talked about whenever they met. The inevitable fact was that the salmon seemed to be gone. They were not starving. It was not that bad. It was summer; there were lots of berries and they had plenty of meat. True enough, some years the fishing had not been as good as other years, but it had never been this bad. Some people had even started saying that something had to be done. But no one could agree on what to do.