Life soon fell into a pattern at the new village. Everyone had a job to do and busied himself doing it. For the men, much of their time was taken up hunting meat in the jungle. Rachel soon learned that the more men there were, the better everyone ate. Mostly the men used poisoned darts fired from a blowpipe to catch their prey, which consisted primarily of monkeys and wild hogs. And everyone tried his or her hand at spearing fish in the river. The children also caught fish with their hands in the streams that fed into the river, while the women cultivated yucca and bananas and gathered firewood. Rachel was amazed at the bounty the jungle provided to eat. Often a group would go off into the jungle in search of bees’ nests and would bring back gourd bowls filled with honey.
One day Kimo came running into the clearing and announced that he had killed a prized amunga monkey with his blowpipe. But alas, the creature had fallen into the hollow center of a large tree, and Kimo needed help to retrieve it. Soon a large group of people had formed to help Kimo, and Dayuma invited Rachel to go along. Happily and loudly the group followed Kimo through the jungle to the tree in question. When they got there, Kimo and several of the boys in the group surveyed the situation, and then they got to work. First they chopped down several smaller trees to clear a place for the large tree to fall. Then they began hacking at the trunk of the large tree with their machetes. Soon the tree came crashing to the ground, much to the delight of everybody. Kimo ran over to it and retrieved the carcass of the monkey he had killed. Then he discovered an added bonus. Deep down in the hollow trunk two porcupines were hiding. Since they were too far down for anyone to reach them, a fire was lit to try to smoke them out.
As the attempt was made, the Waoranis chattered and giggled among themselves. Rachel marveled at how happy and content they seemed to be and how they all worked together to retrieve the dead monkey and to try to smoke out the porcupines. It was hard for her to imagine at that moment that this was a tribe of people who could ruthlessly turn on each other with their spears.
When, despite the smoke, the porcupines refused to budge from the hollow tree trunk, it was decided to leave them there and head back to the village. After all, the people had an amunga monkey, and they would eat well.
Most of the things the Waoranis ate, Rachel could eat. But she drew the line at eating monkey heads. She could eat the monkeys’ roasted, hairy legs, but the heads reminded her of the shrunken heads the Shapra Indians produced from the severed heads of their enemies. Rachel soon learned that the Waoranis were not insulted by her not eating the monkey heads. To them monkey heads were a delicacy, and the fewer people who ate them, the more there was for the others to eat. So they never pressed her to eat the heads.
Each day seemed to pass pretty much as the day before, unless a tapir, deer, or wild hog was speared. Then a feast was in order.
For Rachel and Betty the days were filled with language study and the daily work of staying alive and clean in the jungle. Unlike the Waoranis, the two women had clothes to wash and hang out to dry on nearby bushes, and letters to write in the hope that they would soon find a way to get them to a post office.
Rachel also took on the task of drawing a family tree for the tribe. The tribe was more tangled than even she could have imagined. The Waoranis used the same words for father and uncle and for mother and aunt. This made things extremely difficult, as did the fact that men could be married to more than one woman. Many facts emerged as Rachel asked questions about kinship and was faced with the brutality of the revenge system. Rachel noted that Dayuma’s mother, Akawo, had seen her father, a brother, two sisters, and a husband, son, daughter, and son-in-law speared to death, as well as many other more distant relatives.
In the process of this research, Rachel also learned the identities of all the men who speared Nate and the other four men to death: Dayuma’s uncles Gikita and Kimo, Nimonga, Dyuwi, and Minkayi. Rachel also learned the events that had led up to the killing. The harrowing story was one of treachery and ignorance.
Naenkiwi and Gimari, whom the five missionaries on Palm Beach had referred to as George and Delilah, had wanted to marry, but Akawo did not like Naenkiwi and would not give them permission to marry. This had upset Gimari, who told her mother that if she did not change her mind about the wedding, she would run away to the cowadi who had dropped gifts to them from the wood-bee in the sky and were now camped on the Curaray. But Akawo just laughed at her daughter, and in a rage Gimari set off through the jungle. Naenkiwi soon set out after her. However, in Waorani culture it is a bad thing for an unmarried man and woman to be alone together, so Mintaka—Dayuma and Gimari’s aunt—followed them. The three of them arrived at Palm Beach together, where they met the cowadi, who turned out to be a strange group of people but not dangerous. Repeatedly Gimari asked the cowadi to take her in the wood-bee to visit her sister Dayuma, but the cowadi did not understand. And then late in the afternoon, the wood-bee had flown away without Gimari. Again, Gimari had stormed off in a rage, and Naenkiwi had followed her. But Mintaka decided to stay with the cowadi for the night. In the morning, she reasoned, perhaps the cowadi would take her in the wood-bee to see her niece Dayuma. But when she awoke in the morning, the wood-bee was not at the beach, so she left too.
Back at the village the following morning, Naenkiwi made up lies about the cowadi to cover the fact that he had been alone with Gimari throughout the night. He told those at the village that the cowadi had attacked the three of them and wanted to kill and eat them. He and Gimari had run in the same direction, but Mintaka had run in another direction. The three of them had become separated, and Naenkiwi and Gimari had been forced to spend the night together. But that point was not important, Naenkiwi had pointed out. What was important was that a group of dangerous cowadi had invaded their territory, intent on harming them, just as all the other cowadi had done in the past, and they must do something about it.
The Waorani had hoped that the cowadi in the yellow wood-bee would be friendly. After all, they had dropped many gifts to them. But now they knew that that was not true; Naenkiwi had told them so.
“This is the work of a clever enemy,” Gikita had told everyone. “Only a clever enemy would pretend to be friendly and then attack. With their wood-bee and gifts, these cowadi are extra clever!”
Gikita went on to recall all the awful things other cowadi had done to them throughout the years. His stories whipped the young men of the village into a frenzy of hate, and the men began to sharpen new spears with which to spear the cowadi on the banks of the Curaray River.
When Mintaka eventually arrived back at the village, she told everyone that Naenkiwi had lied, that these were peaceful cowadi. But it was too late. In their frenzied state, the men set out for the Curaray.
The Waorani men found Nate and the other four missionaries resting on the beach. They used three women who had gone with them as decoys to wade across the river and engage the cowadis’ attention while the men crept around behind the missionaries and speared them. Within minutes all five cowadi had been speared to death. The enemy that had invaded the Waoranis’ territory was beaten, and the group were soon headed back to the village to celebrate.
Rachel also learned that Naenkiwi, whose lies had led to the killings on Palm Beach, had himself been speared and died about a year after the attack on the five men.
As she delved deeper into the family tree of the group, Rachel was confronted with how devastating the constant killing had been on the family. When she left her people twelve years before, Dayuma estimated that there had been about two hundred members in her extended family. Now, Rachel discovered, approximately forty of Dayuma’s relatives were still alive. And most of the 160 who were dead had been killed by spears.
If that were not enough, Rachel soon came face-to-face with the horror of how easily one Waorani would spear another to death. When one of the small boys in the village died, Rachel discovered his father, Tidonca, sharpening a spear made from a chonta palm. When she asked Tidonca what he was doing, he replied, “My son has died. Why should my worthless daughter live?”
Realizing that Tidonca was planning to kill his daughter and bury her with the body of his son—a common practice among the Waorani—Rachel ran to Tidonca, snatched the spear from him, and fled into the jungle. When Rachel finally dared to return to her hut with the spear several hours later, she found Kimo there, standing guard to protect her from Tidonca’s anger.
Rachel hoped and prayed that her actions would not lead to the death of Kimo. Fortunately they did not. With no spear, Tidonca decided not to kill his daughter, and after he had buried his son, his anger at Rachel subsided.
The following day Rachel returned Tidonca’s spear. It was a gesture of trust. Tidonca could easily have turned around and used it against Rachel. But he seemed to grasp the nature of the gesture. He accepted the spear, and he and Rachel became good friends.
As time went on, Rachel became more burdened by the challenges she faced translating the Scriptures into Waorani. The job became more daunting with each passing day. The tribe had no concept of buying, selling, or trading. If there was food left over, it was shared with others. If not, it was all eaten by the family of the person who hunted for it or gathered it. The people also had no job designations, such as fisherman, teacher, farmer, tax collector, tentmaker, or artisan. To introduce such words to them, Rachel had to explain a whole different world.
Rachel labored over decisions about what to label things. She tried to keep words as simple as she could, but it was impossible. Since the tribe had no word for paper or bread, they used the same word, wasp’s nest, since a wasp’s nest looks a little like both. Paper money thus became “wasp’s nest which is given-taken.” Then there was the matter of what was “given-taken” in Bible stories. And apart from Dayuma, no one had ever seen a donkey, sheep, or horse, and trying to explain the difference between these animals was especially frustrating for Rachel. At times she wondered whether she would ever produce a New Testament translation.
Rachel and Betty relied heavily on Dayuma’s help. In a sense Dayuma became the central missionary to her tribe. She began to explain to the group things about the outside world. She taught them to count off the days in units of seven, as they did in the outside world. Then at dawn on the first day, she held a church service in Kimo and Dawa’s hut. People would lounge in their hammocks or sit on the floor or on a log outside as Dayuma told them Bible stories and about “God’s Carving” (the Bible). Dayuma also taught the people to sing short, one-line hymns, or rather chant them in a nasally, minor key, the Waorani version of singing. She also led the group in long prayers. This idea took the members of the group a long time to get used to since they had no concept of addressing God directly. Dayuma would tell everyone while she prayed to close his or her eyes as though going to sleep. If people began to talk during the prayer, Dayuma would interrupt herself and in no uncertain terms tell those who were talking to be quiet.
Rachel watched the faces of the Waorani as Dayuma spoke to them about God. At first the people seemed to betray no emotion or interest in what was being said. But as the weeks rolled by, Rachel began to see some of the people become more interested and engaged. Among those who seemed to be listening more thoughtfully to what Dayuma said were Gikita and Kimo and Dawa.
