Anawak’s Nunavut homecoming and reunion with Ijitsoq Akesuk reunite him with family and place while forcing him to confront the history that made both feel distant. The return moves from the Arctic landscape to a conversation about relocation, identity, and the suspected intelligence beneath the sea. By the time Anawak shares what his team is investigating, the journey has become more than a visit: it has opened a path from long silence toward trust and a different way of approaching the crisis.

Return to Pond Inlet

Akesuk accomplishes what Anawak would not have imagined possible just a day earlier: he brings his nephew home. The arrival in Pond Inlet, also known as Mittimatalik, restores Anawak to scenes of his childhood. As the settlement and airstrip come into view, he feels a weight lift from his chest. The return is not presented as a simple recovery of an unchanged past. It places him in a region whose traditions remain more prominent than in other parts of Nunavut, where some people still practise shamanism alongside Christianity.

After staying overnight at a hotel, the two set out early toward the floe-edge. Akesuk reads the mild weather as a sign that the conditions will allow a hunt, though the journey may take half a day or a full day. Anawak joins the expedition into a landscape he once rejected. As the group travels over the ice, he begins to take part in its practical demands, even feeling proud when he spots a crack in the ice. That small contribution marks a change in his relation to the place: he is no longer only observing a world from which he has been separated.

At the floe-edge

The route brings them past pack ice, open water, and a seal that surfaces before the travelers reach the ocean’s edge. At a camp shared by people from Pond Inlet and Igloolik, Anawak encounters hunters who have already caught a narwhal. They have divided the animal and left its carcass farther east, near the floe-edge. Returning hunters arrive on snowmobiles with their sleds loaded with kayaks and two seals. One warns that seals may reach their feeding and breeding grounds earlier than usual as the ice retreats.

Anawak asks whether anyone has noticed unusual behavior from the whales, including aggression or attacks. The question draws the camp together: its members know the reports that have frightened people elsewhere, but, as far as Anawak can tell, the Arctic has so far been spared. The exchange places the global marine crisis beside the community’s immediate knowledge of seasonal change and hunting. Later, near the narwhal remains, Anawak tells Akesuk that he had hated and despised this place, answering the question his uncle had asked about whether he missed it. The admission is blunt, but it also makes possible a more honest account of what separated them.

The cost of displacement

As they watch the narwhals, Akesuk recounts the relocation of Inuit families by Canadian authorities. Anawak’s uncle was relocated when he was young, as were Anawak’s parents. Families were moved hundreds of kilometres north, without their tents, kayaks, canoes, or sleds; the new settlements were distant from caribou trails and summer breeding grounds. Akesuk explains that the old hunting grounds were then bulldozed to prevent people from returning. The animals did not alter their habits to accommodate the people who had been displaced, leaving families with sharply reduced means of subsistence.

Akesuk traces the effects beyond the initial move. Within a few decades, the community had become dependent on welfare, and the former way of life had been destroyed. Houses built later offered shelter but also represented an imposed pattern of living, unlike the hunting culture they had displaced. He connects the loss of identity with continuing social suffering and argues that the community needs time to come to terms with profound trauma. The account changes the meaning of Anawak’s estrangement: his distance from Nunavut is personal, but it is also rooted in a wider history of state action and cultural disruption.

Disclosure and counsel

Watching the sun hover near the horizon, Anawak impulsively tells Akesuk what the team at Chateau Whistler has been told: they are investigating intelligent beings in the sea. He knows that sharing this information violates Judith Li’s instructions, but he has been silent for much of his life, and Akesuk is the family he has left. The disclosure therefore makes their renewed closeness consequential to the larger plot; Anawak brings the investigation into a conversation grounded in family history and trust.

Akesuk responds through a spiritual framework rather than a scientific one. He suggests that the destruction of life has angered the spirits associated with the creatures of the Earth and the sea, including Sedna. Whatever the beings are, he warns, trying to fight them will achieve nothing. His alternative is to see them as part of humanity and make contact, as Anawak is now making contact with the Inuit world from which he had become estranged. The advice does not solve the scientific problem, but it offers a way to understand the relationship as one requiring recognition rather than conquest.

A changed sense of belonging

A nearby polar bear feeds on the narwhal carcass, scattering birds while a sentry watches with his gun ready. Akesuk identifies the animal as Nanuq and notes its ability to smell the people nearby. Anawak watches without fear as the bear eventually moves away. The encounter remains part of the ordinary life of the camp, but it also follows Akesuk’s counsel about the entanglement of humans, animals, and the sea.

That night, beneath the midnight sun, Anawak hears the sentry call out about the bear and imagines the unknown world below the Arctic Ocean. In a dream he climbs an iceberg formed in Greenland and carried toward Bylot Island by the current. Meltwater gathers at its summit; as the iceberg eventually melts, he imagines descending toward the source of life, where a puzzle awaits. The dream leaves the homecoming open-ended: Anawak has not resolved the mysteries beneath the sea, but he now approaches them with Akesuk’s counsel and a renewed connection to the place and people he had once rejected.