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.
The Eskimos did not attempt to do anything for the poor woman until she had torn away so much of her warm clothing that she stood in danger of freezing to death. Then three men came out and dragged her, shrieking into an igloo. Presently her screams died away and all was quiet.
Dick and Sandy hurried on their way, their flesh still creeping from the scene they had witnessed. But before the moon had once more dropped down under the horizon, they saw several of these attacks of piblockto and became somewhat accustomed to them.
It was in January, during the dark of the moon, that some mysterious enemy began his depredations. First, two dogs were stumbled upon in the dark, their heads crushed in by an axe, and part of their haunches cut away. Next, an Eskimo youth, out to bring in some snow for melting, crawled back to his igloo, hours later, wounded by a spear. Several other Eskimos were pursued by some animal the nature of which they could not detect in the pitchy blackness. Sandy swore that once, when he was about to venture out of the igloo to see how the weather was, that he had touched a cold face with one hand, and that a darker blot in the darkness had melted out of sight, without making any sound in the snow.
Finally, no one but the policemen dared to venture often into the dark, and they only with a weapon handy.
“I’ve got my own ideas as to what this ghost is,” Dick told Sandy. “The policemen think the same as I do, too. It’s as simple as anything.”