Eventually another missionary couple came to Ecuador to help with the work at Shandia. With their arrival, Betty began to feel that it was time to move on from Shandia. But where? Then one day in May 1957, Johnny Keenan flew supplies into Shandia, stopping to chat with Betty. Their conversation quickly turned to the Aucas.
“Would you like to come with me on a bucket drop to the Aucas?” Johnny asked.
Betty was aware that even after the death of the men at Palm Beach, the MAF pilots had continued to fly over the Auca settlements and use the spiral-line technique that Nate had developed to send down gifts to the Aucas. She jumped at the opportunity to fly with Johnny on one of these drops. She quickly arranged for one of her Quichua friends to babysit Valerie and climbed into the plane beside Johnny. Soon they were airborne and headed toward Auca territory. They flew over two Auca settlements but saw no one on the ground. At the third settlement they flew over, they saw a young man standing in the clearing by a thatched house. Immediately Johnny banked the plane into a tight circle and instructed Betty to feed out the line attached to the bucket. In the bucket was a hamburger, and when the bucket reached the ground, the Auca man took the hamburger from it and began to eat. He waved up to the plane between bites to acknowledge the gift.
As Betty and Johnny headed back to Shandia, Betty’s heart soared higher than the airplane. Now, sixteen months after the killing of the men at Palm Beach, perhaps the Aucas were ready for another visit, or even to have missionaries come and live with them. It was hard to tell, but Betty hoped so. Her hopes were quickly dashed a few months later when a hut that Dr. Tidmarsh had built on the Curaray River was sacked. The door to the hut was ripped off, everything inside was stolen, and two lances were left at the scene as a warning to anyone who came near the location again.
After the killings at Palm Beach, Dr. Tidmarsh and his wife had moved to Arajuno. During the weekends Dr. Tidmarsh stayed with his wife in the McCullys’ old house, and during the week he went to the hut he had built on the Curaray. The hut was built right at the edge of Auca territory, where Dr. Tidmarsh hoped to continue the work of making contact with the Aucas. Of course, the sacking of the hut by the Aucas was a setback to his work.
A month after the attack on the hut, Betty and Valerie visited the Tidmarshes at Arajuno. During their visit, some astonishing news unfolded. Three Auca women had walked out of the jungle at a Quichua village on the Curaray River a few miles from Arajuno. The messenger who brought the news to Arajuno did not know what the women wanted, but he did not think that they had violence on their minds. He asked Dr. Tidmarsh what the Quichua villagers should do.
Dr. Tidmarsh turned to Betty, whose heart raced as she realized this was what she had been waiting for, preparing for, since Jim’s death twenty-two months before. After a brief conversation with the Tidmarshes, it was agreed that Betty should go to the village with the messenger to find out more. Mrs. Tidmarsh would watch Valerie, since there was no way Betty could carry a child that distance.
Within an hour Betty had filled a bag with everything she thought she might need: notebooks, pencils, insect repellent, soap, a snakebite kit, a change of clothes, a light blanket, and her camera. She did not take any food or a cooking pot with her, trusting that the Quichuas would share what they had with her.
The trail was arduous. Betty and the messenger scrambled up and down ravines to cross rivers and streams and jumped from boulder to boulder along the river’s edge. Eventually they reached the small Quichua outpost at the edge of the Curaray River. When they arrived, two of the Auca women were still there; the third had returned to the jungle.
The Quichuas of the village kept a careful eye on the Auca newcomers. Two old Quichua grandmothers held the women’s hands and tried to reassure them that they were safe, that no one wanted to harm them, and they need not be afraid. Of course, the two Auca women could not understand a word the Quichua women were saying, but Betty could see that holding their hands was reassuring to the women.
When the two Auca women saw Betty, they gasped in terror. Betty stepped back a little, realizing that they had probably never seen a white woman before. She wanted to give the Auca women a chance to observe that she was not armed and was friendly. It also gave her a chance to observe them. By now the two women were dressed in Quichua clothes, the usual straight navy blue skirt and a checkered blouse. But they wore their hair in the fringed Auca hairstyle and had the distinctive holes in their earlobes from balsa wood plugs.
After a while, the two Auca women began to relax and even allowed Betty to approach them. Betty was shocked to recognize one of the women—she was the older woman who had been on Palm Beach before Jim and the others were killed. She knew the woman’s face from the photos developed from the film in Nate’s camera; the images were now burned into Betty’s mind.
Betty tried not to tremble as she reached out to touch hands with the Auca women. This was a strange and special moment for her.
Soon the two Auca women appeared to be completely comfortable with Betty’s presence. They listened to the ticking of her watch and were delighted when she turned on her flashlight. They even “sang” a monotone chant for her, and Betty could decipher only one sound—a long, drawn-out vowel sound.
The Auca chant went on and on, and many of the Quichuas became restless.
“Maybe they are calling the men to war,” one Quichua man suggested.
“Or they are casting a spell on us,” another chimed in.
When night fell, all eyes were on the Auca women. Betty expected the women to leave the village, but they indicated that they wanted to spend the night. They were shown to a small room in one of the older women’s houses, where they lay down to sleep.
The Quichuas of the village became very nervous as darkness enveloped the settlement, and Betty couldn’t blame them. No one really knew why the women had come. The villagers wondered whether they had been sent as a distraction so that the Aucas could unexpectedly attack the village. The Quichua men slept with their guns and lances beside them and leapt to their feet at the slightest sound. “Aucas!” they would yell, before realizing that what they had heard was a dog barking or a monkey disturbing a branch above.
Betty slept on and off through the night, praying that God would show her how to proceed with this strange circumstance that had presented itself. She knew that one wrong move on her part could scare the Auca women away for good.
As the next day dragged on, a sense of foreboding hung over the settlement. Many villagers still questioned why the Auca women were there. Fortunately, in the afternoon, Dr. Tidmarsh arrived at the village with a tape recorder. Betty was happy to fill him in on the details of what had gone on thus far.
Like Betty, Dr. Tidmarsh had a keen interest in the Auca language. He demonstrated for the two Auca women how the tape recorder worked, and the older of the two appeared to understand immediately. She picked up the microphone and began talking into it. No one had any idea what she was saying, but she did not appear to care. She talked on and on, waving her hands, pointing with her chin, laughing, and flinging her head back as she spoke. It was quite a show, one that Betty wished she could have understood.
Days went by, and Betty and Dr. Tidmarsh continued to collect data on the language. The Auca women showed no signs of wanting to leave, and eventually Betty had to decide what to do next. Her work at Shandia had come to a natural end, and the two Auca women had settled in with the Quichua and appeared ready to continue speaking in their language to her so that she could write down as much of it as possible.
Betty’s choice about what to do seemed obvious. She returned to Shandia, packed a few items, and commissioned a group of Quichua men to carry her things back to the settlement by the Curaray River. She had a special wooden chair made for Valerie for the journey, a chair that could be strapped to the back of one of the porters. And so Betty and Valerie joined the Auca women at the Quichua village deep in the jungle. They had been there only one day and were bathing in the river when a cry came from the village. “Aucas!”
Betty grabbed Valerie and listened.
“They’ve already killed! Honorio is dead. Get out of the river, señora, quickly. The Aucas are coming!”
The men of the village were off hunting at the time—all except Dario. Betty watched as Dario came thundering through the undergrowth, heading west toward the hunting party. One of the Auca women raced after him while the other sat motionless on a rock by the river.
As Betty hurriedly dressed herself and Valerie, she felt sure that the two women understood what was going on. If it was an Auca attack, there was nowhere to hide. Betty decided that it would be safer for her and Valerie in the open rather than in the jungle and stayed put where she was. No more commotion followed, and after about half an hour she carried Valerie back to the cluster of thatched huts that made up the village.
Just as night began to fall, the hunting party returned, carrying with them Honorio’s body, which was riddled with eighteen spears. Some of the spears were decorated, one with some pages from a New Testament and another with the cloth cover of a scrapbook that Mrs. Tidmarsh had made for a bucket drop.
More bad news followed. Honorio’s young wife had been with her husband at the time of the attack, but now she was nowhere to be found. The Quichuas were certain that the Aucas would have taken her away. Betty had no reason to doubt them.
That night Betty did some soul-searching. She felt that she and Valerie were safe—not in the sense that they could not be hurt, kidnapped, or killed but safe in the hands of God, knowing that whatever happened to them was their destiny. Still, by morning it was apparent that no one wanted the two Auca women to stay a day longer in the village. Using the few Auca words she had learned, and with lots of gestures, Betty explained to the two women that she wanted to take them back to Arajuno and then on to Shandia. The two agreed to go with her. By now they had told Betty their names: Mintaka and Maengamo.
Some Quichua Christians at Shandia offered to house the two Auca women as well as Betty and Valerie. The first few days there were hectic. Both Quichuas and white people who wanted to finally see a real, live Auca for themselves came to visit Mintaka and Maengamo.
When things settled down a little, Betty was able to get back to studying the Auca language. The work was painfully slow. Many English words had absolutely no Auca equivalent. Betty wondered what to do about abstract words like love and commitment, and concrete ones like sheep and temple. Worst of all, though, was the women’s insistence that Betty could already understand Auca words and all she needed to do was listen.
Betty realized that this belief stemmed from the fact that the two women had never before encountered anyone who did not speak and understand their language and they assumed that it was spoken, or at least understood, all over the world.
The two women gave Betty an Auca name, Gikari, which means “woodpecker.” Betty could never get to the bottom of why they called her this, but she liked the name anyway. It reminded her of her father’s love of birds.
As the months rolled by, tape recordings of Mintaka and Maengamo talking were sent off to the United States. At the time, Rachel Saint was in the United States with Dayuma, her Auca language informant. Betty wanted Dayuma to listen to the tapes and translate them for her so that she could get a better understanding of the language.
Betty was as amazed as Rachel had been when she learned that the two Auca women talking on the tape were actually Dayuma’s aunts. Soon tape-recorded conversations were flowing back and forth between Dayuma and her aunts.
