Hideaway Strath here for evermore

Lotte is humming this kulning by Jonna Jinton, just the melody.

Lotte watched the “bookends” with fond amusement. Her firstborn and lastborn — blackbird and sparrow — were beginning to explore their world in earnest; it warmed her heart to watch brave little Mallaidh snatch sweet Ceallach’s paw up into her tiny mouth, for they tussled in a way that reminded Lotte of her relationship with her kaksonen. “Mallaidh, Ceallach,” she sang in a soft lilt, punctuating each name with a gentle lick. It was too early for the wee bears to recognize the syllables for what they were, but Lotte talked to them all the time, mixing up the language of her tundra home with the common tongue of the Teekons. It was instinctive for her to warm the babies to her voice as much as her touch and her scent. They would hear her long before they would see her — and hopefully, when they did see her, she was less fat. She had naively assumed that her sides would flatten after the birth of her children, but that was not the case.

She hummed the tule kotiin call of the tundra — a haunting melody that she would one day be forced to use when her children, long of limb and most likely willful, wandered too far from home.