Feature - Return to Ooglit

Ooglit-the place where the walrus haul out to sun themselves. An Inuit word for an ancient place. A mysterious place of tent rings, houses and circles made of giant stones, fashioned by a people long gone. A place changed by people, climate, sea creatures and time itself. A place to visit, especially as the old ones must have: by paddling an umiak or a kayak.
In the last week of July, I stood a dozen feet or so above a glassy sea in 18°C weather, on the top of several terraced beaches. Looking north, just barely visible from this slight rise above the water, the Ooglit Islands appeared to come and go, a mirage hanging above the sea. My kayak lay at the water's edge, my lunch camp ready to be packed away. I hesitated. I knew that the arctic weather could change from placid to furious in an instant. I would definitely be taking a risk going so far offshore. I took a compass bearing. The 60°N bearing from the point here at Nugsanarsuk, out to the islands was a bearing that only a fool would trust. This close to the magnetic pole, a bearing was more changeable than the weather. It was three in the afternoon on a day when the sun wouldn't set for another few weeks. I launched the kayak and slipped into the cockpit, tightened the spray skirt and dipped the paddle into the mirrored surface.
From the water, I couldn't see the islands at all. Still, the Ooglit Islands drew me like a bevy of sirens, tempting me. I had visited these islands almost 30 years ago while hunting with several Inuit. We had harvested several walrus among the ice floes farther offshore and had cached the meat on the island.

It had been a brief visit, but it was vividly etched in my memory. This was finally my chance to return. I would paddle from Hall Beach to Igloolik and, along the way, stop at the Ooglit Islands.
My kayak was flown from Montreal to Iqaluit on Baffin Island and then to Hall Beach on the Melville Peninsula. I followed it a few days later. I got a ride into town from a lanky, friendly guy in a pickup truck and asked him to take me to the village "campground." We laughed. There was no campground, of course. I could have camped anywhere. He took me to a beach made of small, flat, grey stones, many bearing fossil impressions, at the north end of the village. Nearby were the tents of several Inuit elders who had abandoned their wooden houses for the summer months. Early the next morning I loaded the kayak. After several false starts, I managed to fit everything in except my sleeping bag, which I stowed in a dry bag on the deck behind the cockpit. I had brought along two closed-cell-foam pool-noodles to use as beach rollers. They worked perfectly, allowing me to ease the laden kayak down the sloping, pebbly beach. The water was dead calm, reflecting the partly cloudy sky like a mirror. I began following the barren shoreline northward.
Terraced beaches rose, one above the other, relics left over from the last ice age as the land, relieved of its icy burden, rebounded out of the sea. Fifty feet above the water, the rows of gravel level off and stretch inland in an almost unending series of tundra ponds, sedge meadows and low ridges without a bush or tree in sight.