The Ambush

The following is a read aloud story for May 2006. This is one of a series of stories especially written for Awana Clubs, home-schoolers, Sunday school classes, VBS, mission conferences, or just the fun of reading about people in a wild land called: “The Amazon Rain Forest”. Print them out. Collect them. E-mail them to others who would like to get these stories. Use them for the glory of God. We are changing the pace a bit. For the next few months I want to share some true stories of people and events that have happened in the Amazon jungle. In January 1968 my co-worker, Ray Mellott, and I were involved in a hair-raising jungle crime scene. Ray was a veteran of World War II and in his forties, I was 28-years-old. Neither one of us realized the danger we were in and how close we might have come to be killed by arrows.
The old story teller, Douemi (Dough-way-MEE)
(Missionary/cultural observer with the Amazon tribes for many years)
Serving with New Tribes Mission, Sanford, Florida

The man came home from his fields in time to wash up and have supper before the sun went down and darkness swallowed the jungle. He was tired from hours of chopping logs and clearing a field for planting. His mind was on supper and just having a restful evening with his wife and recently born child. They had no neighbors and were
pioneering a homestead far up Fish Creek. “Maria! Maria!” he shouted as he came to the house and realized she was not there. The fire burned in the clay stove. There were evidences of preperation of the meal. But where’s Maria? He decided to take the trail down to the creek as she might be bathing or washing clothes or cleaning fish. “MARIA!” he shouted and heard only his own desparate voice. Then he saw the young woman’s body in the yard. He raced to where she had fallen and to his horror saw that she and their child had been riddled with thirteen arrows. One arrow had gone right through the body of the baby and into the mother! Shock! Fear! And then he raced to the house to get his shotgun. But it was all over. Maria was dead. The baby was dead. His world had crashed down on his head!
Ray and I had been in Brasil less that three years. We had teamed up to begin an evangelical work with some tribe in the Jurua River area. Our families had just arrived in the small river-front town of Eirunepe and we would be making various survey trips to the Indian villages. We were still learning Portuguese. And we were not expecting to receive an offical summons from the Department of Indian Affairs asking us to investigate the murder of a woman and her child. But there was the letter. The official request. The new missionaries were now police!! Well, investigators anyway. We went to Eirunepe’s local police commander, but he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Your names are on the request. They are asking you to do it! Just go do it!” Thank you, Sir! Alright, we wanted to do a survey anyway..so, let’s go do it!
After a long boat ride up river to a rubber cutting settlement called Deixa-Falar (Let-Him-Speak) we met the people and heard details from them of the Indian attack on the woman. Everyone was upset and threatening to retaliate by attacking the nearby Indian villages. Finally, a man named “Grilo” (Cricket) said that he would be our guide with a couple of his friends. He would take us to the village of the Indians who killed the woman.
“Ray,” I am sure I must have said over and over again, “what are we doing? How in the world did we get in the middle of this mess? Is it safe? Will we be killed too? Will there be a big fight between these angry settlers and the dangerous wild Indians? Are our wives going to be widows?” I definitely had the Jim Elliott and Nate Saint story firmly fixed in my mind. They were killed only a little over ten years before by savage Auca in Ecuador. Was I turning my beloved Nadine into an “Elizabeth Elliott”? And what of Ray’s wife, Lena, who must have been so nervous for Ray to return?
We followed our guides deeper and deeper into the forest. I wore jeans and tennis shoes and we were soaked in sweat and mud and scatched and cut by the razor sharp briars always reaching out to grab us. And Grilo lost the trail so we wandered for miles getting nowhere. No food. No place to rest. We marched on. Then Grilo suddenly stopped.
“Indians!” he whispered, “there are Indians laying in ambush! I can smell them!” Smell them? Ambush? Everything I feared might happen to us on this trip, was about to happen! We were soon to be pin cushions. Martyrs. Two crazy American missionaries killed by wild Indians in the middle of nowhere! I sniffed and sniffed and could not smell anything but jungle mold and plant mildew. Grilo was frozen in the trail nervously readying his shotgun. “Don’t shoot!” Ray and I both said almost at once. Oh, Lord, please get us out of this!
And, then, slowly an old Indian man and his old wife got up out of the forest brush and grass where they had been laying flat. They were shaking with fear. They were on their way to the village ahead of us and heard us coming and had flattened themselves down in a small gulley. How did Grilo smell them? Oh my, our hearts had been beating so rapidly and we were so scared, and now relief just overwhelmed us. We smiled at the frightened pair and tried to assure them in Portuguese we were friends. The old man spoke a little Portuguese and said he and his wife would go ahead to the village and announce we were coming so the people wouldn’t be afraid of us. We gave the old couple an hour’s head start and when we got to the village everyone was expecting us. No, they hadn’t killed the woman. They were sure it was a wild naked people who had done it. Would we like to go even deeper in the jungle to that people? I don’t think Ray and I needed much time to answer. But Grilo did for us…”You can go with them or return with me!” We went back with Cricket.
Have you ever done something you later regretted doing? Have you walked “where angels fear to tread”? Sometimes we find ourselves in “sticky situations” and wonder how we ever got there. And how we ever will get out of it. I am older and much, much wiser, but I still find myself flirting with a disaster now and then. You cannot escape “risk”. Life is full of risky things. We wouldn’t even get in a car and go out on that highway if we weren’t willing to take the risk of not being hit by a drunk driver. The important thing is to be right in the center of God’s perfect will. If you are obeying God and trusting Him, you will find it is not so scary after all. For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. Is that your life motto? It is mine. Put your life in the hand of God and then the “risk” is His, not yours. Just do it!