Four-year-old Steve had a pretty good idea what his present was. His dad had spent hours building a model railway complete with papier-mache landscape. The track even wound around a model of Mt. Sangay that came complete with a red light at the top and streamers that shook during “eruptions.” As Nate handed the model railroad over, Steve’s eyes lit up. Nate smiled. It was fun to have a son who liked the same things he had liked as a boy. It brought back memories of the B and T and P Depression Railroad he and his brothers had built as children. Nate looked forward to the many happy evenings he and Steve would spend together playing with the model railroad.
Next, Kathy opened her present. It was a doll. Kathy’s six-year-old eyes widened with delight. She knew all about how to look after a baby doll, because she’d spent so much time “helping” her mother with Philip. Now they each had a baby.
Steve and Kathy never let their gifts out of their sight all day. At noon they sat down to enjoy the wonderful feast Marj had cooked for them all. Later in the afternoon, many of the young people from the Berean Bible Institute came to visit. The Saints’ house was a natural gathering place for people in the area.
Because his living room was filled with people, Nate perched on the end of his bed with the typewriter in his lap, trying to finish a letter to his parents. He thought for a while about what to say regarding Operation Auca. It was a problem to him. He wasn’t used to keeping secrets, so he had to be careful about what he said to his parents. He couldn’t give them too many details. No one knew about their plans except the men and their wives. Aside from not wanting other missionaries to be unduly worried about the danger involved in what they were planning to do, they were afraid that if word got out about their plans, the Aucas might be swamped with photographers and journalists coming to record Stone Age men meeting twentieth-century white men.
While they needed secrecy, Nate also knew they needed prayer support, and his and Marj’s parents could always be counted on for prayer during a new project. He started typing away. He wrote: “Please be in prayer for a special project the 3rd of January….We are attempting to contact a primitive group of Indians….I will be flying in support for the operation.…[I] feel a real need for prayer to help at this time. A sudden move or careless word at this critical stage in the operation could slam the door of hope on people who live in the Stone Age.”
The next day, Nate dropped the letter into a mail sack, and the letter began its long journey across the mountains to Quito and then on to Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. By the time it would reach its destination, Nate’s parents would know far more about Operation Auca than the letter could ever have told them.
A week later, on New Year’s Day, 1956, the final plans for Operation Auca were made. With Nate no longer planning to stay overnight in Auca territory, the men felt they needed some extra partners involved in the project so there could be more than just Jim Elliot and Ed McCully left on Palm Beach. There was safety in numbers. Pete Fleming agreed to be part of the group, and Nate had also asked Roger Youderian from Macuma station to join them. This brought the number of people on the beach during the day up to five. However, because the tree house Jim Elliot had prefabricated slept only three men, and because Pete Fleming was the lightest of the team, he was chosen to fly out each night with Nate. Each day, Nate flew over Palm Beach to check whether it remained in good enough condition to land and take off on. Everything was on schedule and going according to plan.
On Tuesday, January 3, 1956, the alarm clock jarred Nate awake at six in the morning. He had managed only a couple of hours of sleep. He had spent most of the night going over in his mind take-offs and landings from Palm Beach. Nate went over every possible situation. On one landing, the plane ploughed into the jungle, and another time it flipped over after its wheels hit a stick that had gone unnoticed. Another time Nate imagined that a group of ants had tunneled under the sand as they often did, and when the Cruiser hit the unstable sand, its wheels caught in the trench and spun the plane out of control. In his mind, Nate practiced for every kind of emergency procedure he had ever heard of, hoping he wouldn’t have to use any of them.
Nate also thought about the danger involved in what he was about to do. The men had done everything possible to keep themselves safe, but they had also promised each other that if Auca warriors attacked them, they would not shoot at them; they would only fire shots over their heads. There would be nothing worse than coming in peace to tell the Aucas about God’s love for them and then shooting them if things didn’t go as they’d planned. Each man had pledged to the others that if it came to that, he would sooner die on Palm Beach at the hands of the Aucas than risk killing people who had no idea who God was or that He loved them.
Besides, Nate and the others had already faced the possibility of death. Being a missionary in the Ecuadoran jungle was not without danger. There were poisonous and dangerous insects and animals in the jungle. Tropical diseases also posed a threat to missionaries, as did accidents from falling trees or from drowning while fording one of the many rivers that crisscrossed the Oriente. On top of that, Nate was a pilot, a job that had certain risks of its own, especially flying in the jungle. Long before he’d agreed to fly support for Operation Auca, Nate had come to terms with the fact that he might die serving as a missionary.
At 8:02 a.m., two minutes behind schedule, Nate took off from Arajuno with Ed McCully and some of the food supplies aboard. He had taken the door off the plane to enable them to transport bulky items. Fifteen minutes later, the two men were over Palm Beach. Nate swooped the Piper Cruiser down for a near landing. As wind rustled through the cabin of the plane, both men peered at the sand racing past beneath them. Were there any sticks or new holes since the last time Nate had looked? They couldn’t see any, so Nate banked the Cruiser around for a landing. He set the flaps and slowed the plane as much as he could before setting his wheels down on the sand. The sand turned out to be softer than he had thought, but it was still firm enough to land and take off on. Nate cut the engine of the plane at the end of Palm Beach. He and Ed had made it safely; they were now in Auca territory. As they sat in the plane for a minute and thought about where they were, they were both filled with a mixture of excitement and apprehension about what lay ahead.
The two of them unloaded the plane. Then Nate took off to pick up Jim Elliot and the precut pieces of lumber for the tree house. Ed waited on the beach for him to return, his ears alert for the slightest sound.
It took Nate five trips to deliver all the men and the equipment to the beach. Once everyone and everything was there, they all knew what to do. Their first job was to put up the tree house so they would have a safe place to spend the nights. A nearby ironwood tree was chosen. As Ed and Jim hammered the first pieces of wood onto the tree to use as steps, they quickly realized why it was called ironwood. It took longer than they’d thought to nail steps up the tree, but no one stopped until the work was finished. Jim gave directions on how to arrange the planks of wood and pieces of iron for their tree house thirty-five feet above the ground.
Once the tree house was finished, Nate and Pete Fleming felt okay about leaving the other three men for the night. The trio would be safe in the tree house, and Nate would fly back first thing in the morning with more supplies. After all five men said a prayer together, Nate and Pete climbed aboard the yellow Piper Cruiser and took off from Palm Beach. As soon as he was airborne, Nate radioed Marj to let her know everything had gone according to schedule. It was a message she’d been anxiously waiting to hear.
Before they headed for Arajuno, Nate and Pete had one last thing they needed to do. They had to invite their “neighbors” over to visit. Nate flew over the Auca village where they had been leaving the gifts and spoke into the loudspeaker. “Come tomorrow to the Curaray River,” he tried to communicate in their language. As he looked down at the faces of the Aucas, they looked puzzled. He wondered if they’d understood any of what he had just told them. Only time would tell.
The next morning, Wednesday, as soon as the fog had cleared, Nate and Pete flew back to Palm Beach and waited for the Aucas to arrive. No one came. It was the same on Thursday. The men discussed the situation. There was no way of knowing whether or not the Aucas had understood. Maybe they didn’t realize how close the men were to their village. Maybe they thought it was a trap. All the men could do was wait and pray that someone would have the courage to come and meet them.
Meanwhile, there was plenty to do around the campsite. Nate, as usual, kept a diary. This time, though, his typewriter had been too heavy to fly in, so he wrote by hand in a small pocket notebook: “Except for forty-seven billion flying insects of every sort, this place is a little paradise. With the help of smoke and repellent we are all enjoying the experience immensely. A little while ago Jim pulled in a fifteen-inch catfish. It is roasting over the fire now.”
Ed had the latest edition of Time magazine with him. He read bits and pieces aloud to them all. President and Mrs. Eisenhower had another grandchild. Five-year-old Prince Charles of England had given his mother a painting of herself for Christmas. The head of General Motors, Harlow Curtice, was Time’s Man of the Year. But it all seemed a million miles away from the tiny strip of sand clinging to the side of a river on the edge of the Amazon Basin.
Every hour or so, Jim Elliot waded out into the river with his Auca phrase book. From the middle of the river he would yell words and phrases into the jungle. “We like you.” “Come and visit us.” “We will not hurt you.” “Come and eat with us.”
Each time a bush rustled or a bird squawked, the men turned to see if they had visitors, but no one came.
Chapter 14
From the Silent Jungle
On Friday morning, Pete Fleming and Nate touched down on Palm Beach at 9 a.m., just in time to join Jim, Roger, and Ed for oatmeal, which was bubbling away in a pot over the fire while Roger mixed up powdered milk to pour on it.
Nate had already had one breakfast at Arajuno, but he was always ready to eat another. After breakfast, the men took their “stations” for the morning. Nate thought it was a strange sight as he cleaned up after breakfast. Three American men were standing a few hundred yards apart, knee-deep in a muddy river yelling phrases in the Auca language. To cover as much jungle as possible with their yelling, Ed stood at the top end of the beach, Roger was near the center of it, and Jim Elliot was as far downstream as was safe. “We like you. We want to be your friends. We want to come near you,” rang through the jungle as the three of them yelled as loud as they could. They had yelled the phrases so often over the past few days that they’d almost forgotten why they were doing it.
As they took a breath between yells, from the silent jungle, leaves rustled. All eyes turned in the direction of the sound. Out from the thick vegetation stepped two Auca women, one who looked about sixteen years old, and the other who looked old enough to be her mother. They were both naked except for a few strands of string around their waists and huge balsa wood plugs in the lobes of their ears. The missionaries stood motionless. They were so excited some Aucas had finally arrived at their camp they almost forgot what to do next. Suddenly they remembered. In unison the three men called, “Poinani” (you’re here), the Auca way of welcoming one another.
The two Auca women looked unsure of what to do next, so Jim Elliot waded cautiously across the river to them. He took both their hands and motioned them toward the campsite. They allowed themselves to be led. So far so good, Nate thought, as he slowly reached into his backpack and pulled out a camera.
