Yellowknife (Aug 20/01) - Before clearing security at the Iqaluit airport, retired RCMP officer Mitch Owens instigates one final conversation in Inuktitut.

An Inuk man smiles. He recognizes the towering white-haired southerner from a recent newspaper article.

Owens, 80, was returning to Ottawa after visiting Mittimatalik/Pond Inlet earlier this month. He served as one of the first RCMP officers in the Baffin Island detachment from 1944 to 1947.

When asked what prompted his return, Owens replies candidly, "Once you reach 80, you don't have much time to sit around. I can't say it was any one thing. It was just time."

Owens' life reads like a CBC documentary.

Born to a wheat-farming family outside Winnipeg in 1921, the tall, skinny teen left home during the Great Depression.

After a brief time as a pharmacy apprentice, he rode the rails, worked as a lumberjack and found his place in bread lines.

In 1942, three years into the Second World War, employment prospects remained bleak. "You couldn't cry yourself a job ... I did what many young men did. I applied to the Air Force, only interested in flying, and to the RCMP," Owens says.

Both organizations wanted him. Owens chose the RCMP.

"Don't forget, people had a great regard for the Mounties at that time," he says.

Northwest Passage pioneer

At the age of 23, Const. Mitch Owens boarded the historic St. Roch -- the first ship to crash through the Northwest Passage. He arrived on Pond Inlet's shores weeks after leaving Halifax with one duffel bag and one knapsack crammed with film and a camera.

His luggage is now displayed aboard the St. Roch at Vancouver's Maritime Museum.

Other than a 10-day tour of the North with then-governor general Ed Schreyer in 1980, the still spry octogenarian had not stepped on Baffin Island since 1947 -- 54 years ago.

The neophyte officer shared a three-room house with another RCMP member. Cash was a foreign object. His $2-a-day salary was deposited into a bank account back in Halifax.

In 1944, Pond Inlet was home to just two Inuit families and a half dozen non-aboriginals. Other families lived in nearby outpost camps.

A quick study, Owens was speaking Inuktitut within six months. Policing duties entailed one murder trial and administering the federal government's now defunct numeric last-name system.

"Here's the thing that bothers me to this day. I was there to maintain sovereignty. The (Inuit) were the most law-abiding, honest, reliable people around. We weren't there to enforce any kind of law. I'm disappointed kids grow up today not knowing that."

Owens learned to trap foxes, travel by dog team and hunt seals and whales. His adept use of pliers and Novocaine earned him the title of dentist.

"Word got around that the young policeman could pull teeth and it didn't hurt," he says.

If he was lonely, he doesn't remember or doesn't say. Questions about girlfriends are politely deflected.

"They were all friends," he says.

Adopting a traditional Inuit way of life came naturally.

"I calculated those people survived for thousands of years and I wanted to be a survivor," Owens says.

Survival strategies

Such skills later saved his life. Years after leaving Pond Inlet, Owens and his police vehicle plunged down a ravine in Cape Breton. Fighting to stay conscious, he forced himself to walk 12 kilometres for help.

"I was starting to hallucinate. I can still see it today. A vivid bright, blue blanket starting to cover me. But I fought it," he recalls.

During his three years in Pond Inlet, contact with the outside world was limited to the annual arrival of the Hudson's Bay Company supply ship the Nascopie. The same ship sunk off the coast of Cape Dorset, ironically en route to retrieve Owens in Pond Inlet in 1947.

Perhaps his greatest nemesis was a battery-operated radio. Every week he tuned in to hear greetings from the south. And every week he was disappointed.

"Whenever it came to my name the radio would fade out," he says with a chuckle.

Const. Mitch Owens and his red serge flew out of Pond Inlet in 1947.

Two years later he married Stella Futa, one of the first women to graduate from Osgoode Hall Law School. Stella's health prevented her from joining her husband this month.

The couple had three children and remain in the same stone cottage they moved into 48 years ago.

Owens returned to Pond Inlet with a photo album of old photographs. The pictures drew many a gasp and a tear, says Pond Inlet resident and RCMP Cpl. Grant MacDonald.

"You could see the excitement on the elders' faces. Mitch clearly had a special bond with many of the residents," MacDonald says.

One such person was Moses Kyak. Just a toddler when Owens left in 1947, Kyak's father was one of Owen's two guides. When the tiny Kyak fell deathly ill, Owens administered the penicillin credited with saving his young life.

"I was very happy to see him. I'm so glad he came back. He told us stories. We had fresh fish and muktaaq at the house," Kyak says.

Owens retired an RCMP corporal in 1963. He worked as a municipal politician and mayor before retiring in 1991. The last 10 years have been spent hunting, fishing and with his six grandchildren and one great grandson.

Eleven years ago, the city of Gloucester named a street after Owens.

Before boarding his flight home to Gloucester Aug. 10 in Iqaluit, he talked fondly of his nostalgic walk down memory lane.

"If you could have seen the looks on their faces as they went through the photo album. It was quite captivating," he says.

"I feel very fortunate to be able to have made this trip."