Bylot Island stands across Eclipse Sound as a defining presence in Leon Anawak’s journey into the High Arctic: a mountainous, ice-fringed landmark whose cliffs and glacier set the scale of the landscape and whose nesting birds make it a living destination along the expedition’s route.

Setting and Appearance

Bylot Island first comes into view from the air, its glaciers and precipitous cliffs rising beyond the ice around Eclipse Sound. From above, the island belongs to a broad northern panorama of pack ice, icebergs, and stark shorelines; for Leon Anawak, the view is part of the strange beauty of a place he recognizes from childhood.

On the overland journey from Pond Inlet, Bylot Island towers across the sound, surrounded by icebergs. An immense glacier pours down from its mountains to the shore, making the island legible even from across the frozen ocean. The contrast between soaring peaks and the flat expanse of sea ice gives the route its scale: the sleds travel across the ocean’s frozen crust beneath a landscape shaped by ice.

The Expedition’s Passage

The expedition moves northeast from Baffin Island across the snow-covered sea, following the guides’ route and circling a crack too wide for the sleds to cross. After hours on the ice, the group reaches the coast of Baffin Island, then continues toward Bylot Island by snowmobile. Meltwater sprays beneath the tracks, while irregular piles of pack ice force the convoy to detour.

The party eventually glides beneath Bylot Island’s cliffs. The journey is not presented as a traverse across the island itself; Bylot instead serves as a striking coastal landmark along a difficult route over ice and water. Its cliffs mark a shift from the open, uneven surface of the sound to a closer encounter with the island’s wildlife-rich margins.

Wildlife and the Floe-Edge

As the convoy passes below the cliffs, the air fills with the calls of kittiwakes nesting in the rocks by the thousands. Great flocks circle above the group, and the convoy halts. The birds make the island more than a distant feature of the horizon: its cliffs are a crowded habitat encountered directly along the expedition’s passage.

The journey continues through a landscape of changing ice and open water. Sun dogs appear in the afternoon light; a seal surfaces to watch the travelers before diving and reappearing. Beyond the stacked pack ice, the open water leads the group to the floe-edge, where a camp of hunters from Pond Inlet and Igloolik is gathered. Bylot Island belongs to this larger setting of travel, hunting, and close attention to seasonal change, even as the narrative does not place every later stop at the island itself.

Narrative Significance

Bylot Island helps make the Arctic journey tangible through successive changes of scale: a shape glimpsed from an aircraft, a glacier seen across the sound, and cliffs passed beneath by the expedition. Its seabird colonies and surrounding ice also establish that the region is not empty wilderness but a lived landscape of wildlife, hunters, and practiced routes.

For Anawak, the landscape has personal as well as geographical force. His return to the Arctic is described as lifting a weight from his chest; the island’s striking presence forms part of a setting in which childhood recognition and the unfamiliar demands of the expedition meet. The route around cracks, over rough ice, and toward open water makes that return concrete: movement depends on reading the environment rather than imposing a direct path upon it.