They found the ice very rotten in places, and often it was covered four or five inches deep with water, through which the dogs had almost to swim and pull the sledges. While crossing one of these places, the dogs drawing the sledge on which the treasured iron lay, suddenly broke through the ice. For a brief moment they struggled to get a foothold amid the broken ice, yelping pitifully with terror, but in the next instant the sledge with its heavy load of men and iron came crashing among them, and shot beneath the water, carrying men and iron and dogs with it. The force and weight of the sledge must have carried it under the unbroken ice, for neither men nor dogs were seen again. This the natives considered the punishment of the spirit of the iron woman for destroying the stone, and from that time to the present it has been looked upon as bad luck to try to move either of the stones. It was for this reason that the Eskimos warned AH-NI-GHI´-TO’S father, when he told them he would take the wonderful stones to his country, not to touch them, for something dreadful would surely happen to him. When they found he was determined, nevertheless, to take away the meteorites, they helped him loosen them and take them down to the ship, but refused to assist him in putting them on board. [Illustration: _Ah-ni-ghi´-to and One of her Brown Fur-clad Friends_] While the work of getting the iron tent alongside the ship was going on, AH-NI-GHI´-TO had a merry time. After the sun shone again, the snow melted rapidly, and she spent her time on shore, picking flowers and berries, which grew among the rocks and on the hillsides; and the Eskimo women built her play “igloos” (houses) just like their own, and taught her different games which she and Laura played with the brown fur-clad children of the North. After many days the iron tupic was ready to be put on board. Everything in the ship had been stowed, and the ship’s hold filled with rocks, on which the iron stone should rest. AH-NI-GHI´-TO’S father had built a bridge from the shore to the middle of the ship, where a big opening in the deck, called the hatch, gave an entrance for the big stone to the hold of the ship. This bridge was built of great oak timbers as long as a tree is tall, and on top of the timbers a railroad track was laid. When the iron stone was dug from the frozen bed in which it had lain so long, it was lifted high enough to slip under it a heavy sled of strong oak timbers, bolted together with long iron bolts and shod with iron.