Tellik Inlet is the waterway beside Cape Dorset that gives Leon Anawak’s homecoming its geography and emotional force. Its islands, tidal flats and modest harbour connect the settlement to Mallikjuaq, while the inlet’s familiar landscape brings Anawak face to face with the childhood home he left nineteen years earlier.

Setting and geography

Seen from the air, Tellik Inlet appears among seven islands as the plane approaches Cape Dorset. The settlement lies in the Sikusiilaq region on the southwest extremity of Baffin Island, where temperate currents keep the sea from freezing even in the harshest winter. The name Sikusiilaq describes a place where ice does not form on the sea; yet in Anawak’s later return, the inlet is frozen enough for Mallikjuaq to appear only a short distance across the ice. The contrast gives the setting a distinctly seasonal character rather than reducing it to a static map feature.

The neighbouring Mallikjuaq is a territorial park with archaeological remains, burial sites and a lake where Anawak and his friends once camped. At low tide, the flats of Tellik Inlet can be crossed on foot to reach the island. The waterway thus shifts between barrier and passage: its changing conditions determine whether the neighbouring shore is reached by boat, across exposed flats or over ice.

Harbour and settlement

Cape Dorset’s harbour consists chiefly of a wharf and loading cranes. Once or twice a year, a supply ship docks there with essential goods for the community. The harbour’s sparse infrastructure reflects the settlement’s connection to the wider world through infrequent maritime deliveries, not through a busy commercial waterfront.

For Anawak, the wharf is also a remembered threshold. At twelve, he left Cape Dorset aboard a supply ship with his new family, who departed with hope for the world ahead and grief for the home they were leaving. The wharf had been his last glimpse of the place before that departure. When he returns as an adult, it is the view across the inlet that he seeks out, and his uncle lets him walk ahead alone.

Anawak’s return

After flying over the sea for twenty minutes, Anawak sees the islands of Tellik Inlet and Cape Dorset’s runway. The plane’s arrival brings an immediate recognition of home, but the settlement he encounters is not simply the place he remembers. The harbour remains a route to Mallikjuaq and the old camping grounds, while the town around it has changed; the inlet supplies a point of continuity amid that difference.

Anawak asks his uncle, Ijitsineq Akesuk, to take him to the harbour. From the wharf he looks across the blue polar water, retracing the last view he had before leaving as a boy. His return is bound to a new departure of another kind: he has come back to bury his father. Tellik Inlet therefore holds together childhood attachment, the pain of leaving, and the difficult work of returning to a changed home.