Mr. Pudlat lived nomadically for the first years of his life. For him, being on the land isn’t just recreation, it’s what makes him Inuit.

When I came back in June, he took me ice fishing one night. At 8 p.m., the sky was still bright and the clouds were reflected in pools of water on the ice, giving the illusion we were flying through the sky behind his snowmobile. It was breathtaking.

Most artists told me they dreamed of this, making enough money to buy a snowmobile or a boat to get back to the land. But few pull it off. Even Mr. Pudlat planned to return to construction, and create art on the side. “It’s not really making a living,” he told me.

Over the course of my trips, my thinking evolved. Initially, I wondered why, with all that talent, Cape Dorset had not been saved by art. By the end, the question I asked myself was how, against all the odds, the artists of Cape Dorset kept producing such spectacular work.

You can check out the latest prints from the hamlet, released last weekend.