The second period of moonlight came at an inopportune time. A dense film of clouds obscured it for four days and the ghostly white snow fields were almost as dark as when there was no moon. But it finally cleared off, only to reveal more trouble. The dogs were dying from attacks of madness. Dick and Sandy counted twenty-two dead in the snow, some their own, some belonging to the Eskimos.
After several hours of observation they discovered a dog in the throes of the polar sickness. The animal began to whine, then suddenly snarled, and frothed at the mouth. After biting himself several times, he ran madly in and out among the igloos, finally circling far out over the snow. When the diseased dog finally rushed panting and red-eyed back to camp, all the other dogs had hidden from him. Dick shot the dog then to prevent its suffering any longer. That was the last case of the madness among the dogs during that phase of the moon.
“It’s what the Eskimos call Piblockto,” Constable Sloan explained. “The Eskimos get it themselves sometimes, especially the women, though it’s not so fatal among human beings as among dogs. So if you fellows hear some unearthly screeching you’ll know what it is. Don’t bother anyone who gets it The natives leave them alone unless they start running away where they’re apt to freeze to death. The fits only last about half an hour.”
The boys did not have to wait long before they saw an actual case of what Constable Sloan had described.
It happened to an Eskimo woman whose month old infant had died of exposure, which was a rare occurrence. Grief stricken, the poor woman was wandering around among the igloos in the moonlight, wailing softly to herself, when the boys chanced to pass her on their way to the policemen’s igloo.
Their hair raised under their parkas as suddenly the woman let out a most blood-curdling scream, leaped into the air several times, and finally commenced to tear her clothes off, piece by piece. Dick and Sandy ran behind an igloo and watched from hiding. Several Eskimos appeared from various igloos, and the boys could hear them babbling about piblockto and the angekok. They gathered that the Eskimos believed the woman was temporarily possessed by one of the bad spirits that haunted the northland.