Arrival, actually

            I arrived in Inukjuak at a reasonable hour, the flight itself took at most forty minutes. I'm greeted by an Inuit lady named Betsy, who is the center coordinator, basically an administrator in charge of orchestrating all the extra logistics which schools in the north need to deal with. She is very pleasant and seems to cope with the unpredictability of everything quite well. I'm given my keys and my young traveling companions are given theirs. My address is simply 610; in Inukjuak the streets have no names. I am between 609 and 611, but my traveling companions' address is in the six-hundred and teens and they are across town from me.

           

My place is really quite nice. I have an extra bedroom I'm going to turn into an office and my kitchen is large enough to have a table will never get in the way of cooking and I have a pantry will a large freezer; all in all much more space than I'm used to having and much more space then I'll likely use. I'm typing this on my kitchen table, not in my office, cause it's still weird for me to use an office.

            I have with me only one pot, that combined with the limited range of reasonably priced ingredients at the co-op have lead me to eat a lot of premade meals. The night I arrive I have a frozen pizza. I look very much forward to having my kitchen supplies and first food order here.

            The landscape here is in some ways quite similar to PUV, grass and moss with various shades of orange and yellow, but here there is the added dimension of many rolling rocky knolls, which add jagged dashes of grey and green to the landscape. I take Ritchie for a walk up one of these rocky hills very near to my house. It is raining and approaching dark, I am not sure what my reason for ascending was if not the view. I am wearing many layers on my torso so my body is warm, but I have yet to find my hat and there is a small tare in my pants which lets the wind blow through, yet I keep climbing. Soon a white owl appears, floating above Ritchie. I stop and watch. The owl circles around Ritchie slowly, observing my dog as I observe it. It dips and rises, while I stand cold from not moving in the rain, but too captivated to move on. The owl is the first arctic creature I have seen, and it is not hard to understand the draw of mysticism.