Baffin Bay is part of the High Arctic setting through which Leon Anawak returns to the landscapes of his childhood. The journey’s significance emerges not from a description of the bay alone, but from the shifting waters and ice around it: a remote environment that draws Anawak’s attention away from the people in the plane and helps him feel, at last, that a weight has lifted from him.

Place in the Arctic journey

The flight toward Pond Inlet carries passengers from Cape Dorset and Iqaluit into the Arctic wilderness. At Ijitsoq Akesuk’s suggestion, the pilot takes a detour east over the Great Plain of Koukdjuak, a wildlife sanctuary dotted with round ponds and home to the world’s largest colony of geese. The plane then follows the coast across the Arctic Circle, passing above Foxe Basin before land rises again in steep, mountainous terrain. The sequence continues over the pack ice of Eclipse Sound, with Bylot Island’s glaciers and cliffs coming into view before the aircraft descends toward Pond Inlet, also known as Mittimatalik.

A landscape of ice and changing light

The passage makes the Arctic legible through successive contrasts: the fissured frozen surface of Foxe Basin, meltwater running into frozen lakes, snowy valleys between brown mountains, and the unbroken blue-tinted ice of Eclipse Sound. Icebergs rise like white crystals from the Sound; two polar bears move across the ice below, while ivory gulls flicker overhead. These details give the region a scale and vitality that the view from the plane cannot contain. Even time behaves differently: the sun remains near the horizon at this season, and at two in the morning it only briefly comes to rest there.

Anawak’s return

For Anawak, the view is more than scenery. As Bylot Island and the shoreline near Pond Inlet appear, he recognizes scenes from his childhood and becomes absorbed in the landscape, losing his ordinary sense of time. His response marks a change in the journey: he feels a weight lift from his chest. Ijitsoq Akesuk’s detour has achieved something Anawak would not have believed possible a day earlier, making the Arctic setting central to his renewed sense of connection with home.