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Eight •————————————• Down the Yukon After their ride through One-­ Mile Rapids, Perrin and Knudson beached their boat on the shores of Lake Bennett. The Viking was no longer seaworthy, so the two men resealed the seams and hammered in the loose nails. While they worked, one of them realized that they had left some provisions behind so they hired a few Indians to walk upstream to retrieve them, and then they reloaded the Viking and relaunched her at the point where One-­ Mile Rapids joined Lake Bennett. The lake is one of several bodies of water that feed the mighty Yukon River as it makes its two-­ thousand-­ mile trip to the Bering Sea. About twenty-­ eight miles long and surrounded by jagged mountains, Bennett can be an unpredictable body of water, but Perrin and Knudson’s trip across was relatively smooth. The Viking bounced over the gentle rollers for about three hours until they reached a spot called Caribou Crossing. This Indian settlement was at the junction of Lake Bennett and Lake Tagish, named for the Tagish Indians who lived there. Adapting to the territory, Perrin wrote that as they rowed through the crossing into Lake Tagish, they caught a few fish by trolling off the Viking’s stern. They also shot and cooked a duck, a most welcome change from their monotonous diet of jerked meat, bacon, and beans. Perrin noted that this was the first game they had in the Yukon.1 Earlier, while working their way across Lake Bennett, the men passed a scow that also was headed for Dawson City. This was a large Down the Yukon 77 craft, carrying nine prospectors and their provisions, and as the Viking passed by, both parties shouted greetings across the water: “That scow wasn’t built for a racer, was she?” hollered the detective. “She’s slow, but sure,” was the reply. “Well, good-­ bye,” said Perrin, as they left the slower vessel behind. “So long,” said a man in the scow. “Save a little of the gold for us.” “Of course.”2 Perrin wouldn’t find out about it until much later, but his pursuit of the Iowa fugitive could have ended right there on Lake Bennett. Frank Novak was on that scow. Ironically, despite Novak having had a long head start, the detective had closed the gap through speed, doggedness, and sheer will. But Perrin didn’t know that at the time. He was under the impression that Novak was already in Dawson City, possibly playing a violin in one of the dance halls. This missed opportunity would cost Perrin dearly for during the next two weeks, he and Knudson came close to losing their lives many times. Lake Tagish was well known for the fierce winds that frequently tore across its surface. That first day they made little progress and, after another long, fatiguing effort, decided to beach their boat and wait for the rough water to die down. While ashore, Perrin found an abandoned Indian village and carefully studied the different names carved into the trees and on a few log cabins; he was looking for either the name Swift, as this was the party that Novak was supposed to be traveling with, or J. A. Smith, the alias that Novak had been using since he left Seattle. But finding neither, he and Knudson shoved off again and made the shore of Lake Marsh at about 9:00 pm on June 22. By this time, Perrin had realized that he was in for an adventure of a lifetime. For him, nothing else would be as dangerous as this pursuit. Just as their boat tacked across the lake, the two men seemed to sail from one incident to the next, some just small annoyances, while others turned out to be much more perilous. Some days they 78 h a r d s h i p s would make as much as twenty or thirty miles; other days, only three or four. But that was the nature of the Yukon—an untamed land of nameless hills and mountains framing the swirling cold gray-­ green waters; a river that could kill without pity or remorse in a place that could drive a man to the brink of insanity and then haul him back to the shores of reason again. Throughout his diary, Perrin frequently complained about one persistent pest—the Yukon mosquito. Sixteen years earlier, an explorer named Johan Adrian Jacobson called the annoying insect a “plague...

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