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A New Zealand poet once lamented the dearth of fairy lore in these islands, and in his ignorance made complaint:
He declared that this lack of faerie glamour must be filled by the imaginative writer—“The poet's art—as yet without avail—must weave the story.” It was unfortunate that a writer with so sympathetic a muse had never heard of the Maori's rich store of fairy legend and wonder-tale, of endless folk-talk about the supernatural, the sprites of the woods, the elusive Patu-paiarehe, the mysterious wild men of the mountains, the strange spirits that haunt great pools at river-sources, and streams and lakes. For all this in endless variety we have in New Zealand. There is not another country, not even Ireland or the
pakeha does not know of it is that very, very few have gone to the trouble to delve into this class of myth and tradition and preserve while there is yet time the curious and poetic tales which crystallize for us the old Maori belief in unseen presences and the fairy folk that haunted many a lofty mountain and many a shadowy wood.
Fairies, giants, fabulous monsters, marvel-working magicians, strange apparitions of forest and alp, have ever been found in countries of such a mountainous, broken and generously-wooded character as New Zealand, and it would be strange indeed if so imaginative a race as the Maori-Polynesian had not peopled the land with all manner of curious extra-human beings.
Poetic above all the other myths of the strange and supernatural are the many stories which tell of that mystic race the Patu-paiarehe. This name Patu-paiarehe is the term applied by the Maori to the mysterious forest-dwelling people who for want of a more exact term may be described as the fairies of New Zealand. They are
iwi-atua, a race of supernatural beings, and they are accredited with some of the marvellous powers attributed to the world of faerie in many other parts of the globe. Some folk-tales of the Maori describe them as little people, but the native fancy does not usually picture them the tiny elves common to the old-world fairydom. Most of the legends I have gathered give them the ordinary stature of mortals, while at the same time investing them with some of the characteristics of the enchanted tribes of other lands.
The Patu-paiarehe were for the most part of much lighter complexion than the Maori; their hair was of the dull golden or reddish hue “uru-kehu,” such as is sometimes seen among the Maoris of to-day. They inhabited the remote parts of the wooded ranges, preferring the highest peaks such as Hihikiwi, on Mount Pirongia, and the summit of Te Aroha. They ventured out only by night and on days of heavy clouds and fog. They lived on forest foods, but sometimes they resorted to the shores of sea and lake for fish.
They had a great aversion to the steam rising from the Maori cooking-ovens, and
kokowai, the red ochre (hæmatite earth mixed with shark oil) with which the Maori bedaubed his dwelling and himself. They were greatly skilled in all manner of enchantments and magic, and they often employed these arts of gramarie to bewilder and terrify the iwi Maori. Nevertheless we find them at times living on good terms with their Maori neighbours, and indeed (see the Story of Tarapikau in “The Wars of the Fairies”) guarding the interests of their friends of the outer world and resenting any interference by Patu-paiarehe from another district.
The Patu-paiarehe, in a number of these fairy tales, constituted themselves the guardians of sacred places and visited their displeasure on those who neglected the rites for the propitiation of the forest deities.
This class of folk-tales no doubt originated in the actual existence of numerous tribes of aborigines who dwelt for safety in the more inaccessible parts of these islands. Many of them were reddish-haired, with fairer complexions than those of the Maori; the remnants of an immeasurably ancient fair-haired people who have left a strain of uru-kehu in most Maori tribes. As in the
Patu-paiarehe were, as a rule, shy and peace-loving. The fiercer foresters, the Maero of legend, were not unlike the Fynnoderee of Manx country tales who played malevolent tricks on the farmer folk.
The dense and thickly-matted character of the New Zealand forest, with a closely-woven roof of foliage through which the sunshine was filtered to a twilight, in the inner sanctuaries of the Wao-tapu-nui-a-Tane, made strong impression on the imaginative Maori mind, and it was natural to people the heart of the bush with unseen presences and supernatural creatures. The conjecture-provoking sounds heard in the forest in the quiet of the night, noises known to those who have bivouacked much in the high woods, heightened the popular belief in the existence of fairy folk.
Patu-paiarehe legendry in the North Island, so far as my enquiries go, is associated chiefly with the forested peaks of the Waikato-Waipa basin, the Cape Colville-Te Aroha range, and the hills about Lake Rotorua. That beautiful mountain Kake-puku, in the Waipa Valley, was a fairy resort; there is a deep wooded valley on the western side beloved of the Patu-paiarehe from Pirongia mountain. They did not venture to other parts of the mountain because they sometimes saw the Maori fires burning on the summit and on the eastern and northern sides. Their path was in the drifting clouds and low-lying banks of fog like the Irish fairy king in William Allingham's old song:
In the South Island the sterner character of the landscapes, the tremendous craggy heights that wall Lake Wakatipu about, the vast white chain of the Alps, the solitudes of the tussock prairie, the silent forests, the deep, dark blue alpine lakes, tended to provide grim legends of the There are analogies in old Scotland. Ruberslaw mountain, above Teviotdale, “was a favourite lurking place for the persecuted Covenanters, and near its top is a craggy chasm, from which it is said Woodrow's ‘savory Mr. Peden’ used to preach to his scattered congregation. It was on this hill that the pursuing dragoons all but caught the preacher and his flock one day; they were caught indeed like rats in a trap, had it not been for Ruberslaw's well known character for breeding bad weather. The soldiers were advancing in full view of the conventicle. Way of escape there was none, nor time to disperse; mounted men from every quarter were scrambling up the steep face of the hill, and in that clear light what chance was left now to hide among the rocks and boulders? ‘O Lord,’ prayed Peden with extreme fervour, ‘lap the skirts of thy cloak over puir auld Sandy!’ And as if in answer to his petition there came over the entire hill a thick ‘Liddesdale drow,’ so dense that a man might not see two feet around him. When the mist cleared again there was no one left for the dragoons to take.” (Maeroero, the
Patu-paiarehe. There was also a basis of fact in the historical tradition of the Ngati-Mamoe fugitives driven into the trackless forests of the great south-west, there to disappear, to vanish like the moa. “They still haunt the western forests,” said an old man of mingled Ngati-Mamoe and Ngai-Tahu blood, when we discussed the mystery of the vanished clan of his people. “They are an iwi-atua, gifted with supernatural powers. The reason they are not seen by pakeha explorers is that they can call down the mists and clouds of the mountains to conceal them, as they did long ago when they were pursued into the wilderness beyond Lake Te Anau. Na te kohu i whakaora—the fog is their salvation.”Highways and Byways on the Border, by Andrew and John Lang, p. 184.)
The Menehune, or Manahune, of Polynesian legend were a forest folk whose characteristics no doubt helped to develop the belief in fairy woodsmen. In Hawaiian legendry they were a people of small stature, big-eyed, with murmurous voices; they lived in frail houses of banana leaves. Like our Patu-paiarehe, they feared the daylight, and the herculean labours, such as stone-work, which they performed by night always ceased when the dawn appeared.
Maori folk-talk abounds with such legends. On the upper part of the Waitemata, or Auckland Harbour, there is a long black reef of lava, a flow from the ancient volcano Owairaka (Mount Albert) which extends from the southern side almost halfway across the harbour, towards Kauri Point. It is called by the Maoris Toka-roa, or “Long Reef.” Legend attributes to it a fairy origin. It was built by the Patu-paiarehe in a single night in an endeavour to make a bridge across the
Patu-paiarehe, and so the wonderful bridge was not finished. Here, as in many of our Maori stories, the coming of the dawn was fatal to faerie doings. The furtive folk could not endure the bright eye of Tama-nui-te-Ra.
There are many points of likeness between the Maori traditional accounts of the Patu-paiarehe and kindred beings and the fairies of Irish folk-talk. Lady Gregory, in her “Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland” (1920), describes the popular belief in the existence of the Sidhe, a fairy people fond of old forts. A fairy's voice is sometimes heard keening, a portent. There are fairy pipers among the Sidhe, making music, “the grandest I ever heard,” as one of the old people said. The Maori fairies, similarly, were much given to playing on the flute, the koauau and putorino, “the sweetest music ever heard,” says the Maori.
“There are two classes of fairies, the Dundonians, that are like ourselves, and
Maero.
The Irish fairies cannot bear fire. The Maori Patu-paiarehe and Maero had a similar dislike to fire and also to steam from cooking-ovens.
The rumbling death-coach of Ireland has its parallel in the waka wairua, the ghost-canoe whose appearance was a portent of death.
The Mara-wara, a mermaid of the Galway coast, is like the Maraki-hau of Maori legend, the half-human half-fishlike being whose effigy is seen on the carved fronts of many houses in the Bay of Plenty and Urewera districts.
There are many such parallels in the folkbeliefs of these far-sundered poetic peoples. But the faerie lore of the New Zealand forests, hills and streams has a character all its own, developed by centuries of close contact with Nature in a very beautiful and wonderful environment.
The greybeard Wairehu carried a big iron drum which once held sheep-dip into the carved wharepuni; it was filled with glowing charcoal embers to give us warmth through the night. There was a wintry bite in the air here in high-set Otukou; the breath of ice came on the wings of the keen south wind. The lonely little settlement of the Maori sheep-farming hapu was more than two thousand feet above the sea, squatting on the tussocky banks of a cold clear stream that came flashing down from the gullies of Mount Tongariro. The summit of the snow-tipped volcanic range was within three miles of us; and over its shoulder, as we rode into Otukou that day, we saw mighty Ruapehu, its icy peaks involved in the splendid gloom-clouds of a thunderstorm. In this communal hall and sleeping-house of the village we had plenty of company; the people of the hapu gathered
These isolated subalpine dwellers are a pious people, at any rate in observance of religious ritual, and in the earnestness and simplicity of their devotions they truly are patterns to the pakeha. Not an evening falls without these prayers and hymns in the gargoyled wharepuni. As the people sit there, chanting their soft solemn music, some swaying slightly to and fro as they sing, we observe with much interest their varying types. Some are dark indeed, with narrowed eyes peering out beneath heavy projecting brows, but most of them show the fine open cast of face, with large features, which distinguishes the Ngati-Tuwharetoa and their cousins the Ngati-Raukawa. Many are very fair of skin, and there are two or three women whose beautifully thick and long hair shines with a lustre golden in the firelight; they are of pure Maori blood, though almost as light in complexion as ourselves. They are urukehu or fair-hair; the tradition goes that their remote ancestors were a light-skinned tribe called the Whanau-a-Rangi, which in the pakeha tongue is “Offspring of Heaven.”
A sightly house this within as well as without; its panels and rafters are brightly painted and scrolled, and the foot of the central pillar, the putoko-manawa, is wrought into a carved and tattooed head, the effigy of the tribal founder; his pawa-shell eyes glare belligerently at us over the fire. On the walls hang weapons of the past and present—taiaha and meré and a long-handled tomahawk, deadly weapons all in skilled Maori hands, and a dozen or so of rifles and shot guns.
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Now come the stories, for night after night in the warm and social meeting-house the tales of the times of old are repeated, until every member of the tribe to the youngest is familiar with the unwritten history of the clan and the folk-lore of the land.
And first of all is told the tale of these nearby fire-peaks. Long ago there were magical doings in these parts, the like of which could only happen in old Maoridom, and the story of Ngatoro-from-the-Sky and his wonderful travels and godlike
Wairehu takes the matted floor, and girding his blanket about his waist to give free play to his sinewy, tattooed right arm, he tells, like a Skald of old, the saga of Ngatoro and his travels through an enchanted land.
Ngatoro-i-rangi was the sacred Ariki, the high priest of the Arawa canoe crew, and when that Polynesian ship's company landed at Maketu, in the Bay of Plenty, five hundred years ago, he set forth to explore the strange new land. When he reached the foot of the mountain range now known as Tongariro, he decided to ascend it in order to spy out the country, for, like the modern surveyor, the ancient Maori land-seeker and path-finder always made for the high points of the country in his journeyings. With one or two companions he climbed to the summit of the central volcano, the Ngauruhoe peak, and while he was there a snowstorm suddenly befell, and he was like to die with the freezing cold. In his dire extremity he exerted his marvellous powers, and he prayed in a loud
“E Kuiwai e! Haungaroa e! Ka riro au i te tonga! Haria mai he ahi moku!” (“O Kuiwai! O Haungaroa! I am borne away in the cold south wind—I perish from the cold! Send me fire to warm me!”)
And straightway his priestess sisters heard him, and they appealed to the fire-demons Te Pupu and Te Hoata—personifications these of volcanic and thermal heat—and the saving fire was sent, by way of White Island and Rotorua and intermediate spots where the hot springs boil up to-day. The saving fire reached the perishing Ariki there on the mountain-top, and his freezing body gained fresh life, and he and his companions were saved. The fire which was his salvation burst forth at the top of Ngauruhoe—and that is why there is a fuming crater there to this day. And from the words riro (carried away or seized) and tonga (south wind) which he used in his cry to the goddesses of the sacred fire, came the name Tongariro, which was bestowed upon these grand volcanic peaks. For, the name Tongariro formerly included in Maori usage all three peaks—Tongariro
kopu, the belly of this island-fish, the abode of the fire-gods, ever afterwards to be regarded as the holy of holies of the Arawa nation.
As for Ngauruhoe, that name also holds a story, said Wairehu. When Ngatoro-i-Rangi, freezing in his tapa-cloth garments there on the mountain-top, made his urgent cry for help, he slew a female slave as an offering to the gods—“he whakahere ki te atua”—in order to give additional mana to his prayer. This slave, who was a personal attendant and food-bearer, was named Auruhoe. When the god-sent flames of life burst forth, Ngatoro threw the body of the slave into the blazing crater, and that was how the volcano came to bear its present name, which is Auruhoe in the mouths of some of the Maoris of the south Taupo country.
And from that time to this the flaming of Ngauruhoe has been a mighty sign of portent for the dwellers on the plains below. Whenever the volcano burst into eruption the Taupo people said to each other, “Lo! the Atua is giving us a sign and a command. Let us go forth and make war
Ngatoro, the Old Man narrated, was an explorer of amazing energy, and gifted with all the strange powers of a wizard. He scaled the loftiest mountains with ease, and as we have seen, he could call fire to his aid through the very earth. And listen to the story of what befell his land-seeking rival, the venturesome Hape-ki-tua-rangi, who came trudging across the ranges and plains from the far East Coast, thinking to found a nation in the heart of the great island.
As Ngatoro stood there near the lofty peak of Ngauruhoe, viewing the wonderful new land spread all about him, he beheld with the god-aided vision of the seer and
Ngatoro recited his heaven-compelling incantations; he called upon the gods of the sky and the gods of the under-world, and chiefly upon Ruaimoko, the dread demon of volcanoes. And strange and terrible things befell.
The sky suddenly became dark as night, and out burst a huge sheet of flame from
huka descended upon Hape and his party, and they perished there upon those dreadful plains. They perished everyone. “Kaitoa! It served them right,” said Wairehu, “for persisting in their march when they saw that my ancestor Ngatoro was already in possession of the country!” And from that day to this the desert where Hape perished has been known as Te Rangi Po—the Place Where the Sky is Dark.
Certainly it is well enough named, that tract of true desert, admitted the pakeha listeners. The Rangi-Po is a sterile, bare, forbidding place wherein for broad spaces even the hardy tussock declines to grow. A bleak, shivery gale-swept plain, to be passed as quickly as possible. It looks a blasted heath, lying even to this day under the curse of the gods.
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Of Pihanga, too, we hear, yon softly-rounded mountain of green forest, above Roto-a-Ira lake, and of her beauty of form which captivated the mountain-gods of old. For mountains were strangely like human beings in those wonderful dim days when all the world was in faerie land; they loved and they fought like mortals. It was over fair Pihanga that Tongariro and Taranaki quarrelled, and titanic indeed was the battle of the volcanoes, ending in the expulsion of Taranaki from his mighty seat on the plains between Tongariro and snowy Ruapehu, and his flight to the far west coast of the island. So to-day Lady Pihanga—so obviously of the female sex, says the Maori, for look you, her shape!—sits complacently there accepting the love of her volcanic husband, in the long streamers of cloud and sulphurous vapours that are borne to her on the wings of the strong south wind. It is the mihi of the mountains, the loving greetings in upper air. And when, sometimes for days at a time, the summits of the ranges are veiled in mist and fog, the Maoris of Otukou and Papakai say: “Behold, our ancestors, our father and
Those were the lines that went through my mind as I observed one of Wairehu's visitors, a restless-eyed gaunt fellow, by repute a tohunga and bush medicine-man; the kind of man who made new cults and fanatic religions. He followed Wairehu in the story-telling, and in a curious half-chanting voice he told of the wizardly powers of an ancestor on his mother's side. That warlock forefather of his lived far away down on the West Coast, on the Waitotara River. In the valley of this river there were several great forts, built on high hills, separated by deep swamps and bends of the stream. The wizard of the Waitotara, however, had no difficulty in passing from hill-village to village of his tribe, for he flew through the air. His name was Tama-ahua-rere-rangi, which means “The
mana, his innate magic influence. A thought was to him as wings; he had first but to resolve that he would fly to such and such a place and invoke his gods, and lo! he was there. But alas! suddenly he lost his gift. His powers of flight deserted him, all in the space between dusk-time and daylight, and he that had been as a god now had to trudge the earth like a common mortal when he travelled from village to village.
“How did he lose that strange power?” asked one of the young women around the glowing brazier.
“My girl,” said the saturnine one, “it was all through you women that he became flightless like the kiwi. He married him a wife one night, and in the morning he that had been a god in himself was but an ordinary man of the earth. His thoughts were wings no longer. That is why my ancestor Tama lost his magical powers. The thought comes to me, we men would all be gods if we had no women to despoil us of our strength. For myself, I despise all women. Would that my ancestor had
pakeha airmen who cross lands and seas in their flying ships—for I would need no ship.”
“E tama!” exclaimed Wairehu. “If your ancestor had been like you, my son, where would you have been? Now answer me that!”
“Pah!” said Ripeka of the coppery hair, with a gesture of her pipe towards the misanthropic Cassius. “His talk is all rupahu—the boast and brag that hide a disappointment in love. For was it not he who but three days ago besought my sister, the widow, in Tokaanu for a share of her sleeping-mat—which she refused him, having a pleasanter husband in view!”
And the laugh was against Cassius that time.
Now came a story ancient beyond compare; it took us into the misty past when the ancestors of the Maori dwelt far away in the isles of the equatorial Pacific, indeed farther back still to the tropic lands of Indonesia. The old man Tamaira, the genealogist and poet of his tribe, passed his
In the long ago, said Tamaira, there was a certain man of this world and he dwelt in his village at Karewa, in Hawaiki, the ancient home of the Maori. He took a wife; in due course a child was born, then another child. Both of these children were girls. The elder the parents named Hine-rangi (“Heavenly Maid”); the younger they named Hine-mai-te-uru (“Girl from the West”). Hine-rangi was set apart by her parents and the tribe as a puhi (virgin); she was not permitted to indulge in early love-affairs like the other young people. She was given a separate house, and in this house she lived, some little distance from the others in the pa. There she slept by herself, this maiden Hine-rangi.
Now there was a certain man of the Patu-paiarehe people, and his name was Miru. He beheld the beautiful Hine-rangi, so treasured by her people, and the thought came to him that he would secure the girl of this world (te ao maori nei) as his wife. So by night he went cautiously into the pa
In course of time the people observed the condition of Hine-rangi, and it became known among all the tribe that their puhi was presently to become a mother. There was great excitement on this discovery being made, and intense curiosity was aroused as to who Hine-rangi's lover could possibly be, for none had been seen to approach the abode. Everyone asked who could Hine-rangi's husband be, but no one in the pa could answer the question.
At last the question was put to the girl herself: “E kui, nowhea to tane inahoki kua hapu koe?” (“O woman, whence came your husband by whom you are with child?”) Hine-rangi's reply was: “Kaore koutou e kite i taku tane. E hara ia i
tenei ao.” (“You cannot see my husband; he is not a man of this world.”)
Then the people, more puzzled than ever, considered how they might discover this mysterious lover of her whom they had dedicated as a puhi. At last they thought of a plan whereby they could lay hold of him. They resolved to cover up all the openings by which light was admitted to Hine-rangi's house, so that the lover would not know when the day was at hand.
Evening came, and the dark night, and the time came when the mysterious lover stole unseen into the house of Hine-rangi. The people silently surrounded the dwelling, and waited until they knew the pair must be asleep. Then they fastened the door and the window and plugged up all the openings in the house that could admit daylight. When they had done this not a streak of light could penetrate into Hine-rangi's abode.
The time of morning came, and Miru awoke, and he thought that this must be a very long night, but the interior of the house was still in profound darkness, so he turned to slumber again. The morning went on, and high noon came. The sun was
Now all at once the people drew back the door and the window and rushed into the house. The astonished Miru leaped from the couch, and the people saw him and seized him, and so at last they knew who Hine-rangi's strange lover was.
This was the beginning of Miru's life with his wife Hine-rangi in the sight of all the people. He was received as a friend and a tribesman, and he remained there with his wife. Presently a child was born to them, a son, and he was named Tonga-te-uru. The Patu-paiarehe chief continued to dwell there in the pa, and in time Hine-rangi gave birth to another son, who was named Uru-makawe.
Now the thought came to Miru that he would return to the home of his own people. So he said to his father-in-law, “E koro! Come you and your tribe, and escort me to my own land, to greet my people there.” To this the father-in-law agreed, but he was not willing that Hine-rangi should leave his home and go away with Miru, for he did not wish her to live in that strange place.
A large party of the tribe assembled, and they departed to escort Miru to his home, and Hine-rangi bade farewell to her husband and remained in the pa, but the younger sister Hine-mai-te-uru accompanied the party of travellers.
When the party arrived at the home of Miru in that other land they were taken to a house which stood in the pa. It was an exceedingly large house, and in it were assembled all the Patu-paiarehe people to greet the strangers. This house, which was called “Hui-te-rangiora,” was a place where-in all the sacred wisdom of the people was taught—the rites of the makutu wizardry, the spells of the atahu (love-charms), and all manner of priestly knowledge. In it also were taught such games as the whai (cat's cradle, string games), the titi-torea or game with throwing-sticks, the working of the wooden marionettes that were caused to imitate haka dances, etc., and other diversions. The art of beautiful wood-carving too was taught.
Every desirable kind of knowledge was imparted to scholars in this great house. And the tino tohunga, the chief teacher and
Patu-paiarehe husband of Hine-rangi.
When the father-in-law of Miru beheld all the wonderful works of that house; when he saw that it was a place wherein all kinds of magic and wisdom were taught, he made request that Miru should instruct him in all the karakia and other sacred matters that he knew. To this proposal Miru assented, and he taught the man from this world the priestly lore desired. In return for this knowledge the father-in-law gave his younger daughter Hine-mai-te-uru to Miru as wife; she was payment for all the karakia which Miru had taught him.
Then he and his people prepared to leave the land of Miru. Before departure the father wept with his daughter, Hine-mai-te-uru, whom he was leaving to be a wife to the Patu-paiarehe, and he chanted over her a lament, for he knew that he would see her no more.
Then the father-in-law of Miru returned to this world. Hine-rangi was told that her sister had been given to Miru as his wife, and she wept for the fairy husband who was now separated from her and living in his own land with her sister Hine-mai-te-uru.
The thought came now to the father of Hine-rangi that he would build a large house similar to that which he had seen in the home of Miru, in that other world. The house was built, and it was named after that fairy hall “Hui-te-rangiora,” which means the assembly place of all beautiful things, the home of peace and happiness. Then in that house the old man taught his grandson Tonga-te-uru all the sacred wisdom and occult rites he had learned from the chief tohunga of the Patu-paiarehe. And he chanted this song over his grandson:
And the young man Tonga-te-uru, having learned all the charms and prayers and ceremonies and all the games of skill that he had learned from Miru, remained in the house to be a chief teacher and tohunga among the people. That is
whare-kura or lodge of instruction of our Maori people, and from that time to this there has been a “Hui-te-rangiora” among us, and even at this day our chieftainess
This legend of Miru and Hine-rangi bears the stamp of great antiquity and is of much significance to the ethnologist, for it describes the contact between the remote ancestors of the Maori and a people apparently more advanced in culture. In a number of Maori-Polynesian traditions the underworld, in other words the home of a strange race, is mentioned as the place of origin of various arts and crafts, such as carving and tattooing, and of occult knowledge. Here the people of this strange land are described as fairies. Miru is sometimes spoken of as one of the guardian atua of the underworld or the place of departed souls. The name indeed takes us very far back in Polynesian origins. In Hindu mythology Meru is the abode of the god Vishnu, it is the top of a mountain of enormous height, the Olympus of the Indian people.
My old Arawa friend Te Matehaere, one-time guerrilla soldier and bush-scout, lives in a very beautiful and romantic spot, the ancient ditched and parapeted fortress Weriweri, overlooking the soft blue expanse of Rotorua Lake. Weriweri pa was built by Matehaere's great ancestor Ihenga five centuries ago, and there within the entrenched lines the old warrior lives today, growing his potatoes and kumara and maize, enjoying the fruit and shade of his orchard trees; gazing out over the calm and lovely lake; crooning the love-chants of his youth and the songs of the fairy tribe with whom his forefather made friends in the dim and wonderful past.
Yonder to the south of Weriweri, lifting steeply from the plain in fern-hung scarps, is the fairy mountain Ngongotaha, and about that peak of his forefather's Matehaere has many a curious story. His description of the fairy folk as handed down
Patu-paiarehe that I have yet heard from Maori lips.
“Long ago,” said Te Matehaere, “the summit of yon mountain Ngongotaha, the peak-top called Te Tuahu a te Atua (“The Altar of the God”) was the chief home of the fairy people of this country. The name of that tribe of Patu-paiarehe was Ngati-Rua, and the chiefs of that tribe in the days of my ancestor Ihenga were Tuehu, Te Rangitamai, Tongakohu, and Rotokohu. The people were very numerous; there were a thousand or perhaps many more on Ngongotaha. They were an iwi atua (a god-like race, a people of supernatural powers). In appearance some of them were very much like the Maori people of today; others resembled the pakeha race. The colour of most of them was kiri puwhero (reddish skins), and their hair had the red or golden tinge which we call uru-kehu. Some had black eyes, some blue like fair-skinned Europeans. They were about the same height as ourselves. Some of their women were very beautiful, very fair of complexion, with shining fair hair. They
pakerangi, dyed a red colour; they also wore the rough mats pora and pureke. In disposition they were peaceful; they were not a war-loving, angry people. Their food consisted of the products of the forest, and they also came down to this Lake Rotorua to catch inanga (whitebait.) There was one curious characteristic of these Patu-paiarehe; they had a great dread of the steam that rose from cooked food. In the evenings, when the Maori people living at Te Raho-o-te-Rangipiere and other places near the fairy abodes opened their cooking-ovens, all the Patu-paiarehe retired to their houses immediately they saw the clouds of vapour rising, and shut themselves up; they were afraid of the mamaoa—the steam.
“The Patu-paiarehe of Ngongotaha had no water supply close to their pa; the mountain is a very dry place, at any rate near the summit, the sacred Tuahu a te Atua. So the women had to come a long way to draw their supplies from a spring under the northern cliffs, near the side of the Kauae spur—the ancient sacred burial place of the Ngati-Whakaue tribe—whence they carried water up the mountain in
taha (gourd calabashes). And there it was, upon the slopes of the fairy mountain, that my ancestor Ihenga met a woman of the Patu-paiarehe, when he first explored these parts nearly twenty generations ago.
“When Ihenga came to the bank of the stream now called the Ngongotaha,” the old legend-keeper continued, “he beheld a curl of smoke rising near the summit of the great mountain looming dark-blue above him. Maybe the smoke he saw was but a fairy mist. He left his wife on the shore of the lake to await his return, and ascended the mountain to discover what people dwelt there. As he climbed he had to press his way through thick fern on the lower slopes of the mountain before he came to the forest. There was much new fern springing up, and the fine pollen from this entered his mouth and nostrils and produced an intense thirst. He looked for a spring of water or a stream whereat he might drink, but found none. He toiled upward, and when he came near the top of the peak he came all suddenly on the home of the Patu-paiarehe. He gazed marvelling on those strange people, whom he came to know well in after-time. He was able to
ngongo, to drink—also the wooden mouthpiece of the drinking-vessel—and taha, a calabash. The fairy people pressed around him in great curiosity, touching him, feeling him all over and asking innumerable questions. At last he became alarmed, thinking perhaps that they might kill and eat him, and he turned and broke through them and fled down the mountain side. The Patu-paiarehe tribe chased him, but he far outstripped all of them except the young beauty who had given him the drink of water. She wished to catch the stranger and make him her husband. She cast away most of her garments in order to run the faster, and Ihenga, looking back as he raced down the rough mountain side, perceived that he would quickly be caught. He knew now that the uncanny people were Patu-paiarehe and he knew also that if once the athletic fairy lady seized him and laid her spell upon him he would never see his Maori wife again.
“In that moment he bethought him of a trick to stay the pursuit. He carried attached to his girdle a small putea or flax satchel, containing some kokowai, red ochre mixed with shark oil, which he used on occasions for painting his body. He opened this as he ran and smeared himself with it. Now, the fairy people are very dainty in some ways, as compared with the Maoris. The haunga or odour of the shark-oil so disgusted the young woman that she stopped and gave up the chase, and Ihenga rejoined his wife on the beach of the lake and told of his strange adventure.
“But later Ihenga became very friendly with the Patu-paiarehe, and dwelt quite near to them in his pa Whakaeke-tahuna, on the Waiteti stream, near the northern base of the fairy mountain; it is not far from the sacred stream to which you and I once went to see Ihenga's axe-polishing stone, the tapu Wai-oro-toki brook of which no man may drink and live.”
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From an old couple, too, who lived by the Wai-o-whiro stream, near the base of Ngongotaha mountain, came poetic stories
Patu-paiarehe. They sometimes went out wild pig-hunting on the ferny slopes of Ngongotaha, and the husband sometimes hunted the kiwi in the depths of the bush, for his wife desired the feathers of that night-roving bird to stitch into the fine mats and kits which she wove so industriously. But nothing would induce either of them to go up that way on a foggy day, when the mists hung low on the sides of the Fairy Mountain. For then, said they, the Patu-paiarehe were abroad, and sometimes their ghostly voices could be heard, and it would perhaps not be good to meet them. Their mental attitude towards the mythical Patu-paiarehe seemed to be a mixture of fear and veneration, and, strangely, a little affection: exactly the feeling of the Irish peasant and the primitive Highlander, as revealed in Old World folk-lore tales. And they delighted in crooning the old, old fairy songs. One of these was a little fairy haka. Their ancestors, said they, had heard these dance songs chanted high up on the misty mountain on still, calm days when the fog enveloped the range. This is how the haka chant went:
“When Ihenga,” said the kiwi-hunter, “left this land and went on a journey of exploration through the Island with his followers, even to Waikato and Kaipara, the Patu-paiarehe sorrowed greatly, and sang songs of lamentation for their friend, who never returned to them. Some of the fairy people went in search of him and followed him all the way to the far North, and some of them found him at Moehau (Cape Colville), where that long and lofty headland runs out into the sea to meet Aotea, the Great Barrier Island; and there they stayed, and so to this day fairies are sometimes to be heard singing their songs far up on misty Moehau.”
“Ae,” said the wife, Huhia, “but it was really the fire that drove most of the fairies away. There are some there still, as we know, but most of the tribe vanished when
Patu-paiarehe chanted as he wept over his beloved Ngongotaha—--”
And the tattooed old dame chanted a low, mournful song which I afterwards committed to my note-book, and now give in the Maori and in English:
It was a Maori “Lochaber No More,” a lament for the ancestral shieling from which the old stock—not unlike the Highland crofters at the other end of the world—were evicted by the new lords of the land with axe and fire-brand.
“Yet there are still fairies in the fastnesses of Ngongotaha,” said Huhia. “On dim and cloudy days, and when the mists descend and envelope the mountain side, the thin voices of the Patu-paiarehe people may be heard, high up on the mountains, and also the music of their flutes, the putorino, sounding very sweet, like spirit music, through the fog.”
This story was told to me by the old blind man Te Pou, as we sat under the comfortable lee of a high row of flaxbushes at his little kainga, under the shadow of Mount Kakepuku. This ancient firepeak, a miniature Ngauruhoe in outline, but, unlike Ngauruhoe, its active volcanic age long past, is the most remarkable mountain along the old Maori border. Its form is set in bold down-sweeping lines of rest; its furrowed sides are green with high fern and clumps of forest. Its top is cut off in a saucer-shaped crater, jungly-wooded, and on the rim of the crater are the fern-grown earthworks of immemorial forts. Kakepuku looks a romantic highplace even in the bright cloudless noon of summer; on days of fog, such as it often sees, it is a mountain of enchantment, with an added altitude to its upthrust shoulders as it looms dark blue through the swirling banks of vapour, a peak steeped with native legendry and poetry, of which my old
hapus that dwelt around its foot.
“My friend,” said Te Pou, “now that we are talking of things supernatural, let me tell you something about this mountain above us, my ancestor, Kakepuku. In the first place, it is well known to all of us, of course, that Kakepuku was a human being long, long ago. He was a man, and yonder smaller mountain, Kawa”—the old man pointed to a gently-rounded pa-terraced cone a few miles away due east—“was his wife. For love of him she rejected that other fellow across the great swamp yonder, the hill which is called Puke-tarata. There are some strange tales about the love-making ways of these ancient mountain parents of ours. But what I want to tell you of are the mysterious people who haunt these lofty places. Yon great range of Pirongia, as you know well enough, is the chief home of the Patu-paiarehe, the fairy tribe; their citadel is there, on the very summit of the main peak, the height we call Hihikiwi. On days of cloud and fog they roam abroad, but they are only to be seen by the eyes of the wise men, the tohunga.
“Now, when I was a young fellow, and that was a very long time ago, there came to our home here at the foot of Kakepuku a tohunga, a very skilful man in incantations and Maori medicines, a man whose name was Panapa; he came from the lower Waikato. The purpose for which he came was to cure his relative Taiepa, my grandfather, who lay ill in his whare. Panapa examined the old man, and then announced that he must go forth to the forest and procure a remedy, the water or juice which is contained in a certain kind of aka, or bush-vine. He bade me bring a large bottle—it had contained rum, which was Taiepa's favourite medicine before the tohunga arrived— and also a tin pannikin, and having placed these in a flax kit which I slung on my shoulders, we set forth.
“The tohunga led the way up the mountain side by a narrow track used sometimes by hunters of the wild pig. We climbed until we had reached a thick patch of forest in a deep hollow on the western side of the peak, facing the fairy-peopled ranges of Pirongia. The bush was very much entangled with supplejacks and rata and aka climbers; the trees were very large,
“My companion Panapa searched about in the wood until he found the particular kind of hanging vine of which he had come in search. It was an aka, closely resembling the rata vine, and it was about as thick round as my arm. Taking his small tomahawk from his girdle, and bidding me stand by with the pannikin and the empty rum-bottle, Panapa slashed away at the aka. He cut it into sections each about a foot in length, and as each was cut from the hanging vine he held it over the pannikin in my hands and drained out the brown-coloured watery juice which it contained. This he did with each length of aka, until the bottle was about half-full.
“Presently, when the tohunga was seated on the ground carefully emptying the contents of the pannikin into the bottle, I picked up the tomahawk, and moving a
aka hanging down like a great eel from a lofty tree. I had delivered only one blow, and was in the act of dealing another, when a strange and terrifying thing happened. The forest had been perfectly still for it was a windless, heavy day. Suddenly the tree-tops shook, as from the passage of a strong wind, and the branches creaked and all the leaves of the forest made a loud, murmuring, swishing sound. The bush was full of small unearthly voices. It sent shivers down my backbone, and the hair stood up on my head like the bristles of the wild boar. My legs shook, my heart rolled about in my breast with fright of what I knew not. All this was in an instant of time, and next moment I turned about to call to my companion the tohunga.
“But he had vanished! A few moments before he had been sitting there, with the bottle and pannikin before him—now he was gone! The bottle and pannikin were still there, and there were the marks of Panapa's knees in the soft mossy ground. I called aloud, in a shaky voice, ‘Panapa, O Panapa, where are you?’ The forest voices echoed
“In an overpowering fright I rushed out through the bush, leaving the bush medicine vessels there on the ground, and emerged on the open fern slopes. I looked about fearfully. There was no wind whatever, and the forest was all silent and motionless again! Panapa was nowhere in sight. It was as though the earth had swallowed him up, or the ghostly hands that shook the forest trees had, in an eye-wink, borne him away.
“I called again, more loudly than before, but there was no reply, and now what could I do? I would not dare to return to the bush with its mysterious voices and rustlings. I would willingly have fought a human assailant, but what can you do against these impalpable foes in the bush who have no bodies to be smitten and whose unseen presence makes the hair prick upwards like pig's bristles?
“Well”—and the old blind legend-keeper took a long breath after his excitedly vivid narrative, full of dramatic gesture—“well, there was I, safe outside the forest, and down I travelled as fast as I could lay foot
tohunga had vanished, and how the forest spoke to me in terrifying wordless tongues, and I asked my sick grandfather, old Taiepa, what it all meant. And he answered with but two words, as he stretched up his hand towards the mountain: ‘The Patu-paiarehe!’
“And that is what it was. We sat there in the meeting-house, and the old men and women talked of the fairy tribes and of their tricky ways with mortals, and the young people's eyes grew wider and wider with each story of forest wizardry.
“We had the evening meal, and again talked. It was now dark, and a fire burned in the middle of the big whare, at the foot of the carved house-pillar. Suddenly, in its flickering light we saw our missing man, Panapa the tohunga! The lost one had returned. In his hand he carried my flax kit, with the half-full bottle of aka juice and the tin pannikin; in his belt was the little tomahawk. At first we imagined it was but the ghost of Panapa—but there he was in the flesh.
“ ‘Panapa, O Panapa!’ the people
tohunga, upon whose face sat a strange half-dazed look, began a long story which occupied till well on to midnight. And this is the substance of his curious tale:
“It was the fairies who had snatched him away—the Patu-paiarehe from Pirongia. On such dim and cloudy days as these they often crossed from their home mountain to Kakepuku on the wings of the fogs and mists, for they loved to gather on the high forehead of sacred Kakepuku. The bush in which Panapa and I had halted to get the water of the aka vines was their special haunt, and they loved to suck the juice of those vines themselves for it was a drink of the gods and fairies. Panapa had fortified himself against them by repeating charms and incantations as he travelled up, and as he began his work, and all would have gone well but for my interference. I should have contented myself with holding the vessels for the aka liquor, but no—I must go chopping away at the sacred vines without asking Panapa's permission. My heedless actions had brought down upon us both the anger of the fairy guardians of
aka was mahi tohunga—priestly work—not to be entered upon lightly, and such an inexperienced youth as I was should never have used that tomahawk. And the noise of the forest leaves and the waving and creaking of the branches was caused by the forest gods—the Patu-paiarehe, as they seized Panapa, and bore him away with them. They carried him off in the twinkling of an eye, through the upper air; the low-lying banks of fog concealed their passage; they whisked him away, like the wave of a hand, to their fairy fort on the top of Hihikiwi, the summit of Pirongia.
“And Panapa was set down there, surrounded by a great ring of the most strange looking tribe he had ever beheld. Those nearest him were like people of this world, dressed like Maoris of old, in garments made of toi and flax, but their faces were fairer than Maoris, a pale hue as if they were ever strangers to full daylight. Their eyes were blue, like the lakes or the ocean on a sunshiny day. Some of their women were amazingly beautiful to Panapa's eye, but for their excessive whiteness of skin. All around gathered the fairies,
karakia, his incantations, repeating them under his breath as fast as he could, and ever he called upon his atua, his special family deity, who was the spirit of a famous ancestor, for deliverance from this affrighting place.
“The fairy chiefs held a council there on Hihikiwi; they discussed what should be done with Panapa for his intrusion upon their sacred places. And Panapa, calling again upon his god, made answer, and pleaded the ignorance of his youthful companion. And his god came to his aid, the spirit of his ancestor: and it so came that the fairy chiefs Te Whanawhana and Te Rangi-pouri (for Panapa heard their names) and their fellow-chiefs of Pirongia mountain, consented to return the tohunga to his world of light and life. Had it been otherwise, he would have remained to become a fairy priest for the Patu-paiarehe
“And again Panapa found himself borne from the ground and carried through the air, supported by the unseen hands which had whisked him away—and, like a flash, the fairies had gone and all was silent again—and there he found himself stretched on the mossy ground in the bush on Kakepuku, and beside him he saw his tomahawk and bottle and the tin pannikin!
“And that was how it ended, this amazing experience of Panapa's. In a dreamy, half-dazed way he looked about him, remembered where he was, then picked up his tomahawk and the bottle of bush-vine juice and the pannikin, and wandered out of the lonely forest and down the mountainside and home to us here at Pokuru. And that was the fortunate ending of Panapa's adventure with the Patu-paiarehe.”
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“And what about the sick man?” I asked, when the story-teller had ended. “How did he fare after all this?”
“Oh, old Taiepa,” said Te Pou. “I had forgotten about him for the moment. Oh, the aka juice was an exceedingly powerful
tohunga, and these charms were made powerful by Panapa's ancestral god. For what avail is there in charms and prayers unless you have a god strong enough to give effect to them? And, my friend, I think it was exceedingly fortunate for Panapa that he possessed a god of such mana. Had it not been so he would have been bound to the forests for ever, in the fairy kainga on Pirongia's highest peak.”
This is one of the many tales of the Nehenehe-nui, the forest and its people, told me by the old man Te Pou. More than most natives was he saturated with the spirit of the bush and the strange lore of the bush life and elusive bush tribes. He was a true Peter Pan, for all his tattoo and his grey hairs. Had he been a matter-of-fact unimaginative pakeha he might of course have explained away those quaint old tales of the Patu-paiarehe and their doings by referring them to a period when native tribes vanquished in war were driven into the rugged mountains, there to live a life of seclusion varied by occasional guerrilla raids upon the dwellers in the open country. But Te Pou has the soul of a poet.
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It is not so very long ago (said my old tohunga friend) since two ancestors of my hapu lived over yonder on the western side of the Waipa River, on the narrow levels
kumara and potatoes was at the edge of the forest; in fact it was partly surrounded by forest, and the tall rimu and rata stretched their arms over the fringes of the garden plots, for the Maori liked the protection of the high timber for his crops; it saved them many a frost. Into this cultivation one day went the wife Tawhai-tu to dig potatoes for the evening meal. She filled a large kit with the riwai, and then she sought a flax-bush wherefrom to make a kawe or sling to fasten her heavy basket upon her shoulders for the journey to the hamlet of thatched huts where she and her husband dwelt. She could find no flax, therefore she plucked some of the long tough leaves of the wharawhara, growing in a low tree fork, and these leaves she split and knotted for shoulder-straps.
Now, as Tawhai-tu went about her work, she was watched all the time by a strange man who crouched within some low thick
Patu-paiarehe, that is to say a fairy—he was not a man of the Maori people. His home was the bush, and in it he hunted his food. This day he hunted not food but women, for he sought a wife, and it was his fancy to seek for one among the tribes of the Maori. So he stalked the outskirts of Maori settlement for such straggling females as might suit his taste, and here before him was the most desirable one he had ever set eyes upon. For surely Tawhai-tu was a beauty as she sat there unconscious that she was almost within hand-grasp of a Patu-paiarehe. She wore but a waist-mat of flax, for the day was warm and windless, and her well-rounded charms of breast and hip and limb set the man of the mountains on fire for possession of her.
As silently as a night-owl stealing upon a nestling in a hollow tree, so silently the fairy hunter crept up behind the young
aue! while still dazed from the sudden capture she found herself in the depths of the gloomy bush, being borne swiftly through the forest in the wild man's long powerful arms.
Now an even more terrifying thing happened. The fairy with his beautiful burden had gained the summit of a small hill in the forest; its top was clear, in a circle as if artificially formed. This circle Tawhai-tu knew, for all she had heard, must be a meeting-place of the fairies, and therefore tapu. She knew by now, also, that her captor was a Patu-paiarehe—he was not of this Maori world.
The red-haired fairy sat his captive on the ground and in a high thin voice he recited an incantation, and in a moment the hilltop was enveloped in a thick mist. He seized the young woman again, and in another moment she felt herself mounting into the air, sustained by the fairy's arms. All about her were the mists of the mountains. The pair mounted higher and higher, and at last they came to rest upon the higher peak of the ranges, and Tawhaitu knew now that she must be in the most
Patu-paiarehe tribe, on the summit of Mount Pirongia.
She found herself surrounded by strange forest folk, with fair hair of the ruddy tint called uru-kehu. Their garments were but dangling forest leaves. Their habitations were living trees, the mamaku fern-tree and the nikau palm, arranged in the form of small round houses. Into one of these bowers the fairy lover bore Tawhai-tu and now she knew what it was to become the wife of a Patu-paiarehe.
In the morning, while she lay in a deep sleep made heavy by the incantations of the fairy, she was borne away again through the clouds. She awoke, and there she was, lying upon the fairy mound in the bush—and before her stood her husband Ruarangi.
The pair pressed noses and wept as they took each other's hands, and Ruarangi told how in his grief and alarm at his wife's vanishing he had sought her in the forest, fearing greatly that she had been stolen by a Patu-paiarehe.
“Alas! it is even so!” said Tawhai-tu, and she told the strange tale of her abduction and her flight through the air and her night in the fairy citadel. She told that her
The husband and the wife returned to their home, but as the evening approached the thick fogs and mists rolled down from the mountains and all in a moment Tawhaitu vanished from Ruarangi's gaze. The Patu-paiarehe had carried her off again.
In the morning Tawhai-tu was returned to her husband in the same miraculous manner. “Alas!” she said, “I have slept once more with the Patu-paiarehe! His spell is upon me—my will is as the water of yonder river before his incantations and his fairy mana.” And that evening again Ruarangi found himself powerless to hold his wife with him; she vanished in a breath with the cloudy coming of her fairy lord; and as before, in the morning, she stood
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The husband and the wife now resolved to call the tohunga of the tribe to their aid. Ruarangi had watched with spear and stone club to slay the Patu-paiarehe, but what avail are mortal weapons against a fairy chief? He must be fought with charms and potent ceremonies; mere bravery and muscle and spear and club are useless.
The tohunga devised his occult schemes and gave directions to Ruarangi and his wife. “Build quickly,” he said, “a small hut of sapling and fern-tree fronds, and lay across the doorway a heavy timber for a paepaepoto (threshold).”
The shelter was soon built, and then the magician ordered that the timbers of the hut and the threshold should be coated thickly with the red ochre called kokowai. (This is hæmatite earth, mixed with shark oil.) “And paint your bodies also with the kokowai, and smear your garments with it, for it is a thing dreaded by all the fairy tribe.” And this was done, and the odour of the oil-mixed ochre hung heavy on the air.
“Now,” the tohunga said to the young woman, “kindle an earth-oven in front of the hut and when it is heated pour water upon it and place food in it so that the steam of the cooking will safeguard you from the Patu-paiarehe, for the fairy tribe greatly fear the steam that rises from cooking-ovens.” And this was done.
As the sun went down to its cave over the high shoulder of the Hakarimata Range, and the river mists came curling up to mingle with the mists of the mountain, Ruarangi and his wife Tawhai-tu sat within the red-painted threshold of their hut, holding tightly each other's hands, and repeating the charms that the tohunga had taught them. Without stood the tohunga himself, naked but for a kilt of green flax-leaves, reciting his spells to drive away the fairies. The earth-oven had been opened, and its steam enveloped all the front of the whare.
In a moment there appeared the fairy chief Whanawhana. With him came three of his fellow-chiefs of the bush; their names were Te Rangi-pouri, Tapu-te-uru, and Ripiro-aiti. They came to stretch forth their hands and seize Whanawhana's Maori
waiata, a chant of lamentation, and Whana-whana cried aloud for the Maori wife whom he had lost. His spell was powerless now; the tohunga had snatched the woman from his grasp. Bitterly he lamented for the desirable Tawhai-tu, and when his chant of sorrow was ended, he and his companions vanished from the Maoris' sight. They melted into the clouds and the forest; and never again did they trouble Ruarangi and his wife. But the song that Whanawhana the Patu-paiarehe chanted as he stood there outside the sacred circle of incantation was well remembered by those who heard it—it was from it that they learned the names of his fellow-fairies—and it is known among all of us to-day. And this, my friend, is the song—--
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But I need not chant it to my readers. Sufficient is it that I have the words of this true fairy lament, and have done them into English, though in the alien dress they lose the subtle sound and colour of the bush. As for Ruarangi and Tawhai-tu, they are no myth; their descendants live on the banks of the Waipa to this day. “You may know them,” says wise old Te Pou, “by the peculiar tinge of the hair in some of the families; it is what we call uru-kehu, because it is distinctly red or copper-coloured; indeed it glistens like gold in the sun.”
The lofty wooded mountain Te Aroha which rises like a blue cloud behind the spa-town on the willowed banks of the Waihou River, was a haunt of the fairies in the enchanted years of long ago. This is the story of its Patu-paiarehe people and the priest and magician who was their chief, and of the war of old time between them and the forest-folk of the region now known as the King Country.
Matengaro, of Ngati-Maniapoto, speaks:
“In the days of old a chief named Ruatane was the rangatira of the Patu-paiarehe tribe who inhabited the forests of Te Aroha mountain and the wooded ranges extending thence northward to Moehau (Cape Colville). Tarapikau was the chief of the Patu-paiarehe who lived on the ranges of Rangitoto, Wharepuhunga, and Maunga-tautari (in the King Country). Now, in the days of these chiefs, a certain woman of Ngati-Matakore, a sub-tribe of Ngati-Maniapoto, went out alone into the
tawa tree for food. She climbed up through the bush seeking the fruit of the tawa. She trespassed unwittingly on certain sacred places there, and she was seized by Rua-tane, of Te Aroha, who chanced to be visiting Rangitoto. He found her in a sacred place and he carried her off to his home on the highest peak of Te Aroha mountain. When that captive woman of Ngati-Matakore arrived at Te Aroha, she was seen by certain of her spirit relatives (whanaunga wairua) there. Thereupon these relatives of hers journeyed to Rangitoto, and there they told the fairy chief Tarapikau, and made request of him that he should intervene and restore the stolen Maori woman to her home. Upon hearing this, Tarapikau immediately assembled a band of his warriors for the purpose of recapturing the woman. He sent a messenger on ahead to give secret instructions to the woman to remain close to the central house-pillar (poutoko-manawa) of the fairies' meeting-house when the tribe gathered in it.
“The war-party arrived at Te Aroha mountain. Tarapikau led them to the pa of Rua-tane's tribe. When daylight was near, the fairies of Te Aroha gathered in the house for repose. Tarapikau's men chanted an action-song in chorus, the effect of which was to steep the sleepers in profound slumber. Tarapikau then climbed on to the roof of the house, and made an opening in the thatch alongside the top of the centre post. The woman he sought was sitting at the foot of the post. He pulled her up through the opening in the roof, and took her away to Rangitoto, he and all his war-party, and returned her to her home and people.
“When Rua-tane and his tribe awoke from their deep slumbers they saw with amazement that this woman from the Maori world had been taken away from them. They knew that Tarapikau had taken her, and great was their anger. This was the beginning of a quarrel and of war between the two tribes of Patu-paiarehe. So Ruatane in his turn raised a fighting band, and set out for Rangitoto to attack Tarapikau. When that Patu-paiarehe chief observed from afar the army from Te Aroha marching to
opé gathered at Pae-whenua (on the north side of the Rangitoto foothills). Presently Rua-tane arrived with his war party and ascended the slope of Pae-whenua. There he saw the warriors of his antagonist awaiting his attack; they were so numerous that the land was covered with them. When he beheld the great strength of the Rangitoto tribe, he prudently decided not to advance any further, and with all his men he retired to Te Aroha.
“Then, one day, Rua-tane set forth and climbed to the extreme pinnacle of the highest range of Te Aroha, and he gazed far across the plains to the south, towards the Rangitoto mountains, where dwelt his foe Tarapikau. He saw a great totara tree standing on the summit, and he saw Tarapikau sitting on a branch in the east side of the tree. (The intervening distance is fifty miles). He launched a burning spear-dart (kopere) at Tarapikau, who when he saw it hurtling towards him quickly shifted to a branch on the west side of the tree. The fiery dart hurled by Rua-tane struck the first bough on which Tarapikau had been resting and set it ablaze, and it was partly burned
“That was the end of the fighting amongst the Patu-paiarehe tribes. And these were the direct descendants of that Patu-paiarehe chief Tarapikau: Te Ruawharo, Te Waiheru, and Hau-auru.
“The great employment of this fairy chief was the guardianship of the sacred places of his tribe, the wahi tapu at Pamotumotu, Pane-tapu, and Arohena. There are three chief treasures or properties of this fairy tribe on the ranges of Rangitoto: red flax, red-haired pigs and red eels in the streams. Should a Maori person ascend to the sacred places on the ranges, one or other of these objects will be seen, and the trespasser will be seized and carried to the top of the mountains. Not until he is released from the spell by the tohunga can he return to his home.”
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And the fairy army of Tarapikau, the Ngati-Maniapoto elders declare, is to be
A curious instance of the strong belief in the Patu-paiarehe as supernatural beings, in comparatively recent times, is contained in an account of the “Pao-miere” ritual given me by my Ngati-Maniapoto authorities. In the later days of Hauhauism in the King Country a singular cult, an offshoot of the Pai-marire religion, was originated by two tohungas named Rangawhenua and Karepe. At their request the Ngati-Rereahu and certain other sections of Ngati-Maniapoto erected a large prayer-house of a peculiar design. It had two ridge-poles, crossing each other at right angles, and there were four doors, each facing a cardinal point of the compass. This cruciform house was built at Te Tiroa, near Mangapeehi, close to the foot of the Rangitoto Ranges, and in it the tohungas promulgated the new faith, called the “Pao-miere”—a phrase signifying chants to render an enemy powerless. The main purpose of the religion was to combat makutu or witchcraft, which had caused many deaths. (The Karakia to avert these evils and to slay the workers of makutu were given me; they show a reversion to the ancient religion). Another main object was to propitiate the Patu-paiarehe of Rangitoto and to cause them to remain in their ancient haunts as guardians of Ngati-Maniapoto and so preserve the Maori country for the Maori people.
This attitude of the “Pao-miere” priests towards the Patu-paiarehe was the reverse of that attributed to a certain dour old-world tohunga, the Reverend Ezra Peden, of whom Allan Cunningham wrote in his Traditional Tales of the Scottish Border:
“He turned loose many Scripture threatenings against those diminutive and capricious beings the fairies, and sought to preach them from the land. He prayed on every green hill, and held communings in every green valley. He wandered forth at night, as a spiritual champion, to give battle to the enemies of the light. The fairies resigned the contest with a foe equipped from such an armoury and came no more among the sons and daughters of men.”
“There is a wonderful rock over yonder,” said one of my Ngati-Raukawa friends, as we rode on across the fern country southeast of Orakau, on our way to the headquarters village of his tribe at Aote-aroa, a far-back King Country settlement. The Maori pointed ahead to a valley which rifted the plateau stretching away before us to the thunderous blue mass of Wharepuhunga Mountain. “Yonder is the place of the tipua rock which we call Tokahaere—the Rock that Walked. It rests there now, watching all who go by, and it is well to appease the spirit that dwells in it, for it is an enchanted thing and of strange and ancient mana.”
Our road, intersecting here the old Maori track, came all at once to the edge of a boldly-scarped cliff, curving round in a great cirque of dark-grey rhyolite rock, which in places is scooped out in shallow caves. Just in the elbow of the valley, the Manga-komua, and close to the summit
manuka on its very top, and chiselled and fashioned by the fires of long ago and the play of ages of weather. It was about 80 feet in height, a monolith in rhyolite, reminding one of the great rock pillar which the Maoris call Hinemoa, at the foot of Horohoro Mountain. The fern furred its foot; on its lightning-shattered pinnacle, where the sparse bushes grew like hairs, a hawk was perched, on meal-watch intent. So strange and imagination-quickening a rock must have its halo of folk-lore, and this is the story of Tokahaere as told by my friend of Ngati-Raukawa:
Long ago this rock Tokahaere was a human being; he was a man of this world and his home was at Titi-raupenga, that sharp-topped mountain which stands southward yonder, not far from the north-west side of Lake Taupo. (“A famous mountain that; it was a great place for birds—tui, korimako, kaka parrot, and koko or wood pigeon; all these we used to snare and spear there in great numbers and pot in their own fat,
totara-bark baskets.”) This man had a wife, and she was a most troublesome one. She had love affairs with the gallants of the tribe, she talked a great deal, and it was even said that she beat her husband. The husband, instead of silencing her with his stone club, as of course he should have done, decided to leave her. He set out to travel far away to the northward, to seek another home and a more pleasant wife. He travelled by night, and having supernatural means to aid him, he reached this Aotearoa country by dawn. But his wife's vengeance pursued him. She induced a powerful tohunga to bewitch her husband and the spell fell just when he reached this Manga-komua valley and he was turned to stone.
There is another story, that being a man of extraordinary powers he scooped out this deep gorge-like valley as he came. But daylight broke his magic powers, and then the mighty charms of the tohunga at Titi-raupenga prevailed, and he remained fixed here for ever. Kua whakakohatutia—he was transformed to a rock.
So there stands Tokahaere to-day, his mountainous feet sunk in the Maori fern; a
pakeha and Maori. And it is well that the pakeha should learn, before yet the old tales vanish, of the special mana tapu which invisibly blankets lonely Tokahaere. Though petrified, he has specific magic powers remaining. If you wish to avoid heavy rain or other obstruction or inconvenience on your day's journey, you must pay due respect to Tokahaere by pulling a handful of fern or manuka and laying it at his foot, reciting as you do so this ancient prayer to the spirit of the rock:
That is the ceremony of uruuru-whenua, the propitiation of the abiding spirit of that toka-tipua, the enchanted rock.
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We did not neglect that rite. Our tributes of fern were laid at the huge fire-sculptured foot of Tokahaere, the karakia was recited; and the sun shone brightly for us all that long day's ride through the wide and fenceless Maori prairie.
The ancient man
He was born over yonder on the famous battlefield of Orākau, and he had lived all his life within a radius of a few miles from where we sat, and was steeped to the backbone in local legend and song and nature-myth. This is a specimen caught from the sage's lips, in a morning's korero, but I wish I could reproduce for you also the dramatic manner of the telling, the gesture and the chuckle of fun that went with it.
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Yonder fern-grown fort of our ancestors (began the old man) is by name Otautahanga
ngarara, lived in its cave down yonder, in the valley below the southern cliff face of the pa. And that is what I want to tell you—the tale of our ancient guardian, the strange ngarara, whose name was Takere-piripiri.
Now let me explain what the ngarara was like, my pakeha friend. It was like a tuatara lizard in appearance but very much larger. It was an enormous reptile—indeed it was a dragon, with shining mottled scales, immensely strong, with a row of sharp spines on its back, and a spikey tail which it could swing with terrific force. How big was it? you ask. Well, I think it must certainly have been as long as from this verandah to that cabbage-tree at the front gate. How long is that? Yes; well then, it was perhaps twenty feet long, perhaps more. As for girth, why it was thicker
Now you know what this ngarara of ours was like. As for its dwelling-place, there is a hole down there by the side of a quick-thorn hedge on the farm, the dip below the pa, that is the mouth of Takere-piripiri's cave. There is another putanga, or entrance to the cave; it is on the top of the cliff over there, a hole four or five feet wide at the top, but much bigger below; this is where the dragon was accustomed to emerge on sunny days, and lie basking on the hilltop, by the trail side, watching the passers-by and the work of the village.
Now, this ngarara of ours was really a mild-mannered, kindly dragon, in spite of his so terrible appearance. He was the guardian of the pa, and indeed he was a kind of god in himself, for he protected the pa from all harm by his presence. Warparties sometimes attempted to surprise and storm Otau' fort in the night, but always they were hurled back with great slaughter,
mokai, or pet of the head chief of the pa, and every day the chief sent his people with food for the big creature, so that he might rest contentedly there and not be tempted to stray away to some other tribe in search of sustenance, for even god-like dragons require food; and in thus carefully feeding Takerepiripiri the chief, my ancestor, showed good sense, did he not?
Well, there was one kind of food of which the ngarara was extremely fond, and that was cooked tuna, or eels. The streams and swamps were full of tuna, and so the chief had no difficulty in supplying Takere-piripiri with all he required. A good store of the best and fattest of the eels was always steam-cooked for him, and every day a large flax basket was carried down and left at the mouth of the cave.
Now, it happened one day that the old chief's servants being busy at work in the fields he bade his two young grandchildren, a boy and a girl, fill a basket with choice eels which had just been taken from the hangi,
The children obeyed, and, carrying the large basket between them, they set out down along the winding foot trail to the cave.
Now, friend, it had been wiser of the chief, my ancestor, had he allowed his grandchildren to eat their dinner before he sent them on such an errand, for what happened? Why, what would any hungry tamaiti do? As the boy and girl trudged along, the savoury smell of the eels tickled their nostrils, and they said, one to the other, “What truly delicious tuna these are that we are bearing to that hungry old dragon below yonder!” And they paused awhile to gaze with longing eyes on those eels, and then from gazing they fell to taking up one and tasting, and from tasting one they passed to eating ravenously of the fattest tuna.
Ano te rekareka! How sweet and melting they were! Never were there sweeter eels in all the waters of Wairaka! And tuna after tuna went down their throats, until their bellies were distended like that barrel yonder at the gate.
But, look you, they ate only the tail half of the tuna, the fattest part; they left the
tuna, and laughing to think that they were playing such a trick upon the ngarara.
The children came to the cave entrance, and, peering down into the gloomy pit, they could dimly see the dragon lying there, with his great eyes fixed on his fern-hung door, waiting for his food. Hurriedly they set down their basket and turned to climb the steep trail to the village.
Out came Takere-piripiri, hungry, for his midday meal. Sniffing, with pleasure the agreeable odour of the tuna, he pounced upon the basket and with his fore-claws capsized the contents on the ground, as was his way. To his amazement and disgust he saw that only the heads of the eels were left. Roaring with rage he swept up the track after the deceitful children, and seizing them before they had time even to reach the foot of the cliff, he bore them back to his cave. There, by the side of the pile of eelheads,
tamariki. With one bite—two bites—of his great jaws he killed them, and their heads fell on the ground beside the heads of the tuna. Leaving all the heads where they lay, he retreated into the depths of his cave, and there he devoured the boy and girl who had thought to play a joke upon him.
Now (continued the old legend-keeper), the ngarara lay there a long while, thinking, after he had finished his meal, of the two children. His anger was not yet assuaged. He had been treated with contumely by the grandchildren of the chief, and therefore the chief was his enemy now, though they had been such good friends in the past. So the ngarara resolved he would no longer live there as guardian of Otau' pa. He would travel far away and seek a new home.
That night, as soon as darkness fell, Takere-piripiri crawled out from his cave and, turning his head northward, he travelled steadily across country, over plains and through swamps and rivers. When daylight came he had reached the foot of Maungakawa, that high range that overlooks the Waikato country. He ascended the mountain and there he found a convenient cave, near
In the meantime, of course, the two children were missed, and a search was made for them. But it was not until morning that their heads were found, where the indignant ngarara had bitten them off and spat them out. And the story was plain to all eyes. There was the capsized basket of eel-heads by Takere-Piripiri's cave. The chief and all his people at once divined the cause of the ngarara's sudden anger, and the killing of the young people. And though they sorrowed greatly, yet they did not blame the ngarara heavily, after all. They agreed that it was exceedingly wrong of the children to have robbed the tribal pet of his meal, and they could understand his anger. But what they sorrowed over more than anything else was the loss of their god-like guardian. Takere-Piripiri had abandoned them, and, greatly they feared that the mana of their fortress had departed with him.
Hastily and in fear they set their defences in order. But it was not long before it was proven to them in blood that their pa was no longer impregnable. They were assailed
hapu of Ngati-Raukawa fell to the strong hand.
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And what became of the ngarara, you ask, pakeha? Well, he, too, fell upon evil days. When he settled himself in his mountain cave on Maungakawa, he soon began to famish for food, for there was no kind chief there to send him baskets of eels every day. It came about, therefore, that he soon took to man-hunting for his food. He lay in wait by the trailside for Maori travellers. Sometimes a single wayfarer came along the track; he was an easy prey. Sometimes a large party of travellers would pass; in that case the ngarara would lie hidden until all but the last man had gone by, and then he would pounce upon that one and drag him to his cave.
At last, so notorious did the ngarara become, and so weary the tribes of his continual marauding and man-eating, that they resolved to put an end to Takere-Piripiri. This was how they went about it:
The Waikato warriors constructed a great taiki or wickerwork cage, cunningly and strongly woven from the tough creeper plant called mangémangé. It was just like an eelbasket on an immense scale, with trap-door and all. This taiki they dragged down to the track and set it up near Takere-Piripiri's usual hunting ground.
On the top of the cage sat a man, as a poa or bait for the dragon. On either side the host of warriors, armed with long spears and heavy clubs, and ko, or digging implements, crouched in the bush.
Out rushed the ngarara, scenting man. Down the track he came, and right into the trap he blundered. He thought he could seize the man on the cage, but before he knew it he was securely caught in the dragon-basket.
The warriors dashed out from ambush. They fell upon the caged dragon with their sharp-pointed ko and their long spears, and soon stabbed and pounded it to death. And that was the end of the great ngarara, Takere-Piripiri, who had caused the death of so many people, and all because of that basket of eels at Otau Pa.
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So ended the old man his moving tale of the dragon of Ngati-Raukawa. It seems to me that there should be a moral somewhere bound up in this story of the ancient Maori. Maybe it can be formulated thus:
Firstly, don't be mean to your gods, tribal or otherwise; see that they get of your best; no threepenny-bits, no eelheads. Secondly, don't take liberties with even the most good-natured of your friends, lest, peradventure, they turn and rend you.
And, lest you entertain the slightest doubt as to the authenticity of this story of Takere-Piripiri, let me tell you that not only have I been in the ancient hill fort of which he was the guardian, but I have even been in his cave, which is there to this day, below the quickthorn hedge, and empty, which, of course, confirms Tu's tale.
The seaside village of the Ngati-Awa tribe at Whakatane is set on a green bank between cliff and tideway, looking to the sand dunes and the river mouth where the Bay of Plenty rollers tumble on the bar. Behind the kainga of neat pakeha-style cottages, surrounded by fruit groves, the dark volcanic heights go up in a straight wall, crowned with ancient forts where grand old pohutukawa trees stand tenaciously rooted in the trenches and on the very verge of the precipice. On the beach there lie two or three long totara canoes, the village fishing fleet. Te Whare o Toroa, as the hamlet is called, has its carved communal meeting-house without which no Maori settlement is complete or presentable, and a sightly hall it is, this decorative house “Wairaka,” facing the grassy marae, or parade-ground. On one of its amo-maihi, the upright slabs supporting the front gable, a mermaid is figured, carved, a deified ancestress with proud tattooed face,
maraki-hau, an ocean deity; the little village children call her “te queen o te sea.” The concept is ancient Maori; but the trail of the pakeha is over it; the cunning artist in wood-carving has given the tribal goddess a golden crown. Otherwise she is of the maraki-hau which you may see adorning the fronts and the interior posts and slabs which make the village art-galleries in many a settlement along the Bay of Plenty coast and in the Urewera Country. The maraki-hau is usually a male; and this merman is figured with a long snaky tongue ending in a kind of funnel, into which a fish is being sucked, or scooped, and a fluked tail curved like a sea-horse's. And the king of all these sea.-atua is Te Tahi o Te Rangi, whose presentment is seen on house-fronts as far inland as Mata-atua, in the heart of the Urewera mountains.
Hurinui Apanui, the old chief of Ngati-Awa, took me into his house “Wairaka” one day to show me the pictured story of Te Tahi o Te Rangi. It was a curious drawing, crude, yet
haka, in one hand a whalebone meré, in the other three blades of flax. Astern, another whale, a kind of guard of honour to the monster on which the triumphant rider of taniwhas was dancing. And this was the story of that wondrous warrior and magician, told me by Hurinui as we sat on the matted verandah of “Wairaka” where “te queen o te sea” looked out with far, haughty gaze on the tossing waters of the Bay.
Out yonder on the plain, said Hurinui, near by the present road that goes inland parallel with the river to Taneatua and Ruatoki, there lived some generations ago the wise old man Te Tahi o Te Rangi (“The First of the Heavens”). He was a man learned in all occult matters, a wonder-worker and magician, a healer of the sick, and, if need be, a slayer of man by mystic rites. He was a tohunga like that famous magician Tuhoto, whose secret appeal to the spirits of the underworld
tohunga passing. The wise man lived alone in a small raupo-reed house, near a peculiar great lone rock, a grey toka about ten feet high, which stood by the trail-side. You may see it now, this rock, which is called Te-Toka-a Houmea. It is in a wire-fenced paddock close to the road, on the right-hand side as you go, a short distance out of the town on the way to Taneatua. Flax-plants grew in the crevices of the rock; like the big boulder they were tapu, and the tohunga used them in his sacred rites. The rock was his tuahu, his altar of incantations, divination and sacrifice to the gods. No man knows what secret, man-slaying
The people among whom Te Tahi lived at last took secret council, because of their dislike of the tohunga, and resolved to be rid of his presence. They feared to shed his blood, but they could dispose of him without violence. So this was the scheme they devised. They planned a canoe expedition to Whakaari, the island-volcano out yonder in the Bay of Plenty, the ever-smoking, steaming, quivering island of the ahi-tipua, the enchanted fires; the volcano which the pakeha calls White Island. They gave out that they were going for the capture of mutton-birds, the sooty petrels titi and oii which live and breed in the cliffs on the outer rim of Whakaari. They prepared their canoes, large seagoing craft with high well-caulked topsides; they laid in their stores of food and water, for there is no drinking water on sulphurous Whakaari; and when all was ready they invited Te Tahi o Te Rangi to join them, as the tohunga of the expedition, to carry out the ceremonies when the first of the titi were taken, and the rites necessary for safety at sea.
And so, with the tohunga sitting in the place of honour in the stern of the largest
The canoes made Whakaari late in the afternoon, and the crews toiled hard, hauling the craft well up on the beach and making them fast against any possible heavy seas. Then the fowling expedition, having left some men to look after the canoes, set out in quest of the titi. The hunters divided into parties, and it happened that several of the principal men decided to make round along the cliffs to the north-east side of the island, and with them was Te Tahi. The tohunga and his companions, with a slave bearing a flax basket of food and taha or calabashes of water, travelled carefully, but nevertheless with some speed, along the cliff, where stunted pohutukawa trees grew and often offered hand-hold in steep places. By dark they had reached a place where there was a shallow cave in the mountain side, with the sea bellowing far below. They kindled torches, they sought about for the burrows in which the titi live,
Te Tahi was awakened by the warm sunlight streaming into his cave shelter. In a moment he was on his feet; something was wrong. A glance told him the truth. He was deserted. His companions were not in sight. He scrambled along the cliff; he toiled back along the perilous paths. At last he came in sight of the bay and the beach. The canoes were gone.
There they were, out on the ocean, that blazed under the morning sun like a great burnished undulating plate. They were flying-through the water under the driving impulse of two hundred strong arms; the treacherous chiefs Te Tahi could see, balanced amidships; he could almost hear their time-song, the measured “Rité, ko te rité, hukeré, ka hukeré!” He was alone on the desert isle, the island of terror, which he felt even now quaking under his feet, while from the hollow heart of it,
But the tohunga was not without resource in even this dread extremity. A signal-fire, for haply, other canoes, other tribes on the mainland? Useless thought—who could distinguish a fire or a smoke signal on this place of a thousand steam clouds? Te Tahi had other ways. Was he not a god in himself?
About his waist the tohunga wore a girdle consisting of three green blades of flax intertwined. This, though his companions had known it not, was his potent talisman, a thing of sacred mana. He had plucked those leaves from the heart of the tapu flaxbush that grew in the weathered cleft of Te Toka-a-Houmea. Taking off the belt and untwisting the leaves, he waved it on high as he stood on the edge of the promontory, and in high quick tones he cried his appeal to the gods of the sea. He invoked Tangaroa and his creatures of the great deep, he called on the magic name of Tutara-Kauika, he recited the ancient
And behold, the call was answered. A huge black shining shape broke water but a short distance out in the bay, a great sperm whale. From its spiracle it blew a geyser-spout of vapour with the hissing roar of one of those steam pipes on Whakaari. A little rainbow arched its head, in the misty spray of the spout jet. It raised its powerful tail and swept the flukes down and beat the water with a noise that could have been heard a mile away. The sea boiled about it with the commotion of its mighty salute to the magician who stood on the cliff-top.
Te Tahi o Te Rangi quickly descended to the beach. He swam out; it was but a little way, for the island shore was steep-to; Whakaari is just the shell of a precipitous mountain-top. It was Tutara-Kauika himself, the king of all the whales, that had answered his call. He touched the monster's side, and as he did so Tutara-Kauika gently sank; he submerged himself just under the tohunga, and rose with the man of magic seated safely on his back, in the little hollow which all taniwha have, for the special purpose of carrying those who need their aid.
And straightway the enchanted sperm whale turned about and headed southward for the distant shore, its steering mark the purple double hump of Moutohora or Whale Island, standing sentry off Whakatane harbour mouth. And as the tohunga, so strangely saved from the island of terrors, looked about him, he saw another whale appear. It was Tutara-Kauika's attendant. It took its place astern and followed in the white wake left by the swiftly moving monster.
The sails of the canoes were in sight. Tutara-Kauika sped with a movement amazingly swift, yet amazingly smooth, through the gently-heaving blue. Now the red hulls of the canoes were seen. The taniwha flew on, with a white wave spreading away on either side from his cliff-like head, rising like a black island above the foam.
The tohunga rose, he flourished his whale-bone meré in one hand, his three magic flax blades in the other. He chanted a high pealing war-song, the Maro-o-Whakatau, he beat time as though he were directing the paddles of a great canoe. The monster and his chanting chief shot past the canoes, and it was but a little while before he came to the mouth of Whakatane Harbour. And there
tohunga, reciting a thanksgiving karakia, dropped from the whale's back and swam to a near-by rock, which is known as Rukupo. The taniwha and his attendant turned about and sped northward across the Bay; sounding when they reached deep waters and rising again, and spouting at regular intervals as they went.
The tohunga, leaving Rukupo rock, swam up the Whakatane estuary and landed on the beach, near where this house “Wairaka” stands. Thence he travelled leisurely inland to his own abode. And, after a long space, when he knew that the treacherous crews would be approaching from the canoe landing, he went to his sacred rock of power, and there, by the side of Toka-a-Houmea, his magic flax blades in his hands, he was sitting, regarding them with grim, silent triumph, when the men filed past along the trail. Not a word spoke they; their hearts were filled with shame and fear.
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And Te Tahi o Te Rangi stayed not much longer in this land of his deceitful tribespeople. He cast the earth of the place behind him; he travelled to distant parts. He settled
maraki-hau, such as is pictured on our carved houses. And it may be that if I, Hurinui, were in trouble on the sea, and were in peril of drowning, he, or his whale-god, Tutara-Kauika, would come to my aid and lift my head up above the ocean, and bear me to the land as Te Tahi was borne in the days when he was a man of this world.
There is a lonely mountain set like a great blue pyramidal monument on the northern boundary of the old King Country; a peak of bold simplicity in outline, sweeping evenly down to the plain in classic lines of repose; saucer-like of summit, an ancient volcanic crater; its gully-riven sides softly furred with fern and forest. Not a lofty mountain; its altitude is but a matter of some fifteen hundred feet, but its sharply cut commanding form and its isolation give it character and dignity. Its blue-hazed upper valleys are fairy-haunted, in local legend. Kakepuku the Maoris call it, or in full Kakepuku-o-Kahurere, “The Swelled Neck of Flying-Hawk.” And the story goes that it was so named six centuries ago by Rakataura, the priest and magician of the Maori immigrant ship Tainui, a great sailing-canoe from the Eastern Pacific. Raka' with his wife Kahurere explored all this wild new country from Kawhia eastward and southward and gave names to the
But far back beyond Raka's day, very far back indeed, do the poetic folk-tales of Ngati-Maniapoto carry Kakepuku. This is a story of the days when the world was young. A nature-myth which seems to hold a geologic truth, in symbolic form, the history of these volcanic high places.
There was a time long, long ago, said one of my old Ngati-Maniapoto friends, when this mountain did not stand on the Waipa plains. He came from the south searching for his father. “He” is correct, because he is a man mountain. Know you that there is sex among mountains even as among human beings. Why, it is plain to the eye; you can often tell by looking at a mountain whether it is male or female; the shape declares the sex. Kakepuku came to the spot where he now stands, on this eastern side of the Waipa River, and here he beheld the softly rounded beautiful form of Kawa Hill, the female mountain standing yonder; she was the daughter of Mount Pirongia and that graceful peak Taupiri,
tapu head above the most beautiful bend of the Waikato River. His love went forth to Kawa of the tender limbs and the swelling breast and he settled himself on the plain here by her side. But he had rivals. One was Puke-tarata, yon ferny range to the south, on the far side of yon great swamp; the other was Karewa, a dark rocky peak which then stood exactly where the eel-lagoons of the Kawa swamp lay glistening among the reedy marshes in later times. These hills were males, and they were all in love with beautiful Kawa, the only female mountain for many leagues. Both Karewa and Puke-tarata resented Kakepuku's coming and they essayed to eject him from their territory; the more fiercely because they saw that Kakepuku was favoured by the fair Kawa.
Puke-tarata, small and unshapely, was soon worsted; but the jealous Karewa fought Kakepuku with desperate energy. Both mountains summoned up all their tremendous volcanic powers to the struggle. Flames burst from their mighty mouths; they hurled molten rocks and streams of liquid fire and burning clouds of ash at each other; the earth shook and the heavens trembled at
At last Kakepuku prevailed, and the sorely battered Karewa fled the field, leaving Kawa to his rival. He uprooted himself in the night, and retreated westward, pursued by the flaming rocks hurled by his triumphant rival. All the long night he strode westward in terror and rage. It was evening when he began his mountainous flight; it was dawn when he halted (for daylight halts the march in all these tales of faerie and marvel). He remained fixed where the first rays of the morning sun found him. By that time he had entered the ocean, still fleeing westward; and in the deep salt sea he set root again and there he stands to-day, a lone, high rocky island; and his name on the pakeha maps is Gannet Island. So Kakepuku gained Kawa, his heart's desire, and she returns his aroha, and though a plain extends between them—and the pakeha's Main Trunk Railway runs between them, too, along those ferny levels—they are united as in the wonderful days of old. They send their love to each other on the wings of the east and west winds, and when
aroha is for Kakepuku, ake, ake tonu atu, from this day ever onward until the end of time.
Yet, that vanquished lover Karewa, far distant in the ocean foam, has not forgotten the lost Kawa. Sometimes you will see a long streamer of vapour drifting in from the sea across the wooded ranges, drifting in before the steady west wind until it passes Kakepuku, and maybe wisps of that lightsome cloud descend and settle on Kawa's head. That is the sorrowful token of despairing but unceasing love from the ever-sighing vanquished Karewa, the
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Viewing those hills of faerie today one who has heard the curious folk-tale may with a little imagination enter into the spirit of the Maori story. Kakepuku with his powerful poise of blue shoulder and his commanding head is the dominating male; Kawa is the inviting ever-fascinating female. The Main Trunk railway today passes close under the western foot of Kawa, and the traveller may mark how tenderly her easy contour inclines towards her mountain lord. Kawa's ferny flanks enclose a winding crater valley, the existence of which would not be suspected from the eastern side. There she presents the aspect of a nippled hill as symmetrical as if carved. Kawa's firm round bosom is wonderfully tattooed in line after line of scarp, rising in regular tiers of entrenchment, to the summit; the work of the marvellous fortbuilders of old-time. Tarao, the warrior, held that fort many a generation ago until he was ousted by Kawhia invaders, and a singular story there is thereto. Brown warriors and hill-carvers long have been
pakeha's cattle and sheep graze over the slopes of the immemorial fortress; but the lover-mountains remain, facing each other day-long with steadfast gaze, ever renewing the ancient tale of love in the murmurous night winds and the soft mists that make the trail of aroha across the sleeping vale of Kawa. For in the night of faerie the old gods live again.
The Holy-Isle-of-Tinirau, called by moderns Mokoia, which rises like a green pyramid from the middle of the soft blue waters of Rotorua Lake, has ever been a place of wizardry and enchantment, full of strange legends, half fact, half fable. It is the Olympus of the Arawa tribe, the abiding place of the ancient gods, the national ossuary, the hiding-place of the sacred images of stone. On the levels of warm volcanic soil at the foot of the hills the crops of sweet potato are never touched by blight; the magic of the atua-kumara wards off all ills. Above, the never-fading greenwood climbs over deserted fortress and village-site; there within the ferngrown ramparts and fosses the unnumbered generations of brown men and women have mingled with the soil of their mother-isle. Very few Maoris live on the island today; for most of its area is a land
tapu. Amazing tales of sorcery and bedevilment cling to Mokoia, and most curious of all is the story of the encounter between Unuaho the tohunga and Bishop Pa, yonder. This narrative comes from the Maoris. Selwyn, like a wise bishop, never told the story. Maybe he set the inexplicable affair down to the Evil One; for all his learning he was just that medieval type of man.
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On that sunny eastward looking hillslope stood the thrice tapu hut of Unuaho the Wizard, the greatest tohunga, seer, medicineman, and necromancer of the Arawa nation. In front of the thatched and gaily-painted wharé there grew a tall forked ti or palmlily, the cabbage-tree of the white man, rustling its long sword-leaves in the breeze; and at its foot, the venerable witch-doctor used to spread his flax mat, so tapu-besoaked that no one but he dared touch it, and there he would sit through the long quiet days, looking out on the village below and the squares of cultivation and the blue lake beyond; sit like a grim, grey old god guarding
hapu, and thinking the Lord knows what strange thoughts and ancient wisdom in his deep old brain.
He was the Merlin, the Moses of the islanders and their mainland kinsfolk for fifty miles around. Very old and grey was Unuaho. His tangled locks fell in wizard-like disorder about his face; his white beard swept his breast; beneath his white-bushed eyebrows peered out the soul of the mystic. He was a man of extraordinary powers, one whom it were well not to offend. He could choke or paralyse an enemy by “We have lookers (God cut them off among us) that with their only (malignant) eye-glances may strike down a fowl flying; and you shall see the bird tremble in the air with loud shrieking makutu, by witchcraft and the projection of his intensely concentrated will through space. Should a storm arise on the lake, he could quell it by his potent incantations and his sacred mana. Moreover, he could cause the powers of the air to wage war, the lightning to flash and the thunder to resound; and he could kill a bird in mid-air or wither a tree, by sheer force of will-power and magic spells.kâ-kâ-kâ-kâ-kâ. Their looking can blast a palm tree so that you shall see it wither away. These are things well ascertained by many faithful witnesses.” (Doughty's Travels in the Arabian Desert.)
In a canoe, paddled by a dozen brawny young Arawa, came the Bishop to Mokoia's silver beach one day of the late Forties. At Ohinemutu, the great stockaded town of the lakeland people, and at the mission station of Te Ngae, he had heard much of Unuaho the magician. Unuaho held out stubbornly against the new religion, and he was one of the greatest obstacles to mission enterprise in the boiling-water country. Selwyn determined to visit the heathen sage, and win him to the faith, if that were within the four corners of possibility. So up to the tapu'd hillslope he went, and there he found his cheerful old pagan.
Unuaho was pleased that the great Bishop, the “Hori Herewini” of whom he had heard so much, had paid him the compliment of a visit. It was fitting, for should not the chief of all the white tohungas pay a ceremonious call upon the greatest of the brown tohungas? He held the Bishop's hand, and murmured a charm of greeting over it, until the Bishop began to grow uncomfortable, for he felt as if the powers of the Evil One that dominated this romantic pagan isle were beginning to bedevil him already.
Selwyn set to as soon as the preliminary
“So!” said the pagan warlock, gazing with steadfast earnestness into Selwyn's keen eyes. “So! You would have me turn to your religion, would you? But why should I turn? My own faith suffices me. And am I not a god in myself? Have I not power over the elements, over the waters of yon lake spread out below, over the trees that spring from the soil, over the powers of the earth; yes, and over man, too!……Now, hearken you, O Bishop! Because I have affection for you, because in certain matters you are a man for whom I have exceeding regard, I shall make the path straight between us. Let there be a test, a straight and open test. Whichever of us can perform some wonderful deed, which shall be a sign from the gods, shall conquer in this matter of faiths. Let us, each in turn, put forth our
The Bishop sat silent, awaiting further enlightment.
“Behold this tree, this ti growing here in front of my house,” said Unuaho, pointing a long lean finger at the lone cabbage-tree. “Let us try our powers on that to begin with; then we may go further and each endeavour to slay a man by wizardry. Let us each endeavour to wither the green head of this tree. Should you succeed, then shall I acknowledge that your God is stronger than mine, and I shall become a Christian. But if not, not. What say you, chief of all the white tohungas?”
But the Bishop was by no means ready to reduce the issue to a test of theological legerdemain. He shook his head.
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“Then,” said Unuaho, “I will to work. Watch that ti-palm, O Bishop! I shall wither it, green as it is, before your eyes!”
And the sorcerer set to work. Stretching forth his hand, he recited in quick sharp tones his most deadly charms and put forth
ti suddenly lay dead and still. The fresh green tint disappeared; the long leaves drooped grey and dry, lying limp, flaccid, and withered. Unuaho had blasted the lone cabbage tree.
“See!” said the tohunga, “I have withered the tree before your unbelieving eyes! Now, can you bring it to life again?”
The Bishop shook his head but committed himself to no speech.
“Then watch,” said the wizard. “Keep your eyes on that tree, O friend Bishop.”
Again Unuaho recited his mystic karakia, chants quick and rhythmic; again his frame quivered, his eyes burned with godlike fire, as Moses' eyes, we may believe, blazed when he struck water from the living rock. And behold, O Bishop of little faith—the tree turned green again. The dead grey leaves revived, took their former hue and freshness;
The Bishop sadly abandoned the hopeless task of conversion. He bade Unuaho farewell, he descended the hill to his canoe and returned to Ohinemutu, and never again did he set foot on this isle of pagan enchantments. And Unuaho died as he had lived, a heathen as the missionaries called him, content in that he and his gods had vanquished the New Religion.
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Such is the Maori story, told me many a year ago on that sacred hillside of Mokoia by Unuaho's black-bearded grandson Tuki, himself a man wise in Maori lore—he sleeps now with his fathers in that island of the immemorial dead. But to his last days, said Tuki, the wise man of Mokoia held Bishop Selwyn in high regard. “I love that chief of the white tohungas, that keen-faced Bishop,” said Unuaho; “he is a man after my own heart, and in token of my affection for him there shall forever be a Selwyn in my family, in memory of my praying friend in the black hat.”
And thus it came that Tuki's pakeha name was “Hori Herewini,” or George Selwyn.
makutu'd the living tree.”
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One would like to have Selwyn's version of that long ago theological duel. But the great Bishop took it to the grave with him. Verily, he would perhaps have admitted, the Powers of Darkness are now and then mysteriously suffered to prevail over the Children of Light.
Look you there on yon green hillside of Mokoia Island above the village of the kumara growers; the woody hillside where the tui's voice is heard in the evergreen groves. There stands, on a little hillock, a beautiful wide-branched totara tree. It looks as if it had been planted there, it stands so dignified and apart; it looks, too, as if it were guarding the little house just below it in which the Maoris keep the sacred stone image Matua-tonga. This totara tree is called “Te Paré-a-Hatupatu,” which means “Hatupatu's Head-wreath.” It sprang, says legend, from a twig in a head-chaplet of green leaves worn by Hatupatu, who performed many marvellous feats of old, five centuries ago. And there is another head-chaplet tree here. A little to the south of the lone totara tree, above the landing
karaka and wharangi trees. In the middle of the grove is a large tawa tree with a fine spreading head. There is a hollow in the tree-butt near the ground; this, say the Maoris, was formerly an iringa-koiwi, that is to say, a receptacle for the bones of the dead. This tree, like the totara, is known as “Te Paré-a-Hatupatu;” it also sprang, says the legend, from one of the chief's brow-wreaths. A mystic grove this, with its air of pagan sanctity. None but tohungas might enter its shade in the old days; and not a Maori will approach the spirit-haunted tawa now.
The story of Hatupatu, as I heard it one day of long ago, from the venerable man Tamati Hapimana, when we sat at the foot of the totara tree—it is not under the ban of tapu like the tawa grove—is one of those curious folk-tales in which fact and fiction are hopelessly intertwined in characteristic Polynesian fashion.
Hatupatu was a youth who came to these shores in the Arawa canoe from the Maori South Sea fatherland. With his elder brothers, Ha-nui, and Ha-roa, he went
koko (the tui or parson-bird), the noisy kaka (parrot), and the soft-cooing kuku (the wood-pigeon)—what beautiful onomatopoetic names the primitive Maori gave to the forest-birds! In the depths of the woods near the Waikato River he was caught by a frightful female ogre, a harpy whose name was Kura-ngaituku,—“Kura-of-the-Claws”—who was feathered like a bird, and armed with very long sharp talons, with which she speared her prey in the bush. (You may see her presentment carved on the doors of some Maori communal halls in the Rotorua country; half-woman, half-bird, with little birds nestling in her hair or flying about her.) Hatupatu was borne off by the feathered giantess to her gloomy home, which was a cave near the top of a rocky mountain above the Waikato River. There the witch lived, and there she had a kind of aviary of tame birds; and in and out of crevices in the rocky walls of the cave played little lizards, each of which had a name given it by Kura-of-the-Claws. There she set her latest captive,
Hatupatu awaited an opportunity to escape, and one day when Kura-of-the-Claws was out in search of food he fled from the cave-dwelling, after liberating all the birds. And one of these birds the riroriro—the little grey warbler—flew off in search of its mistress, crying and chirruping as it went, “O Kura', O Kura', Hatupatu has gone!” And the witch-giantess came back to her cave and seeing that Hatupatu had let her pet birds go free and had, moreover, killed all the pet lizards he could find, she set out in furious anger to recapture the fugitive. From hill to hill she went on Hatu's trail, half-leaping, half-flying, her fierce eagle-eyes darting this way and that for Hatupatu. The Arawa youth, fortifying himself with powerful incantations—taught him by his elders, and chief of all by Ngatoro-i-rangi the great tohunga—swiftly crossed mountains and valleys and streams, but the infuriated Kura' took whole hills at a stride. She was close on Hatupatu's heels when in his desperation as he came to a great rock, a round boulder lying at the foot of a
“Matiti, Matata!”
At this Maori “Open, Sesame” the huge rock straightway split open, revealing a hollow in its heart. Hatupatu leaped in and the rock closed after him. Kura' was just a moment too late. She tore savagely at the boulder with her fearful claws but Hatu' was safe. This refuge-place of Hatupatu's, in local folk-lore, is a large peculiarly shaped rhyolite rock, hollowed out on one side as by human agency, which stands by the roadside at the foot of Ngatuku Hill; the rock is seen on the left as one goes along the old road from Rotorua to Taupo just before the Waikato River bridge is reached at Atiamuri. The hollow interior of the stone, the side facing the hill, is somewhat like an arm-chair seat. Maori travellers to this day lay offering of manuka twigs or fern in the cavity of the rock, in propitiation of the ancient genius loci. This practice is supposed to avert rain-storms and other hindrances on one's journey.
The witch woman tarried long in the woods above, waiting for Hatupatu to emerge from his rock shelter. At last he did so, and fled northward over the plains and hills toward Rotorua Lake, with Kura again in hot chase. The race went on until the pair came to the Pareuru Pass, a narrow ferny valley between the square-topped hill Owhinau and the steep slants of Moerangi
The rock refuge gave Hatupatu a moment's breathing space, then on he fled again, down the Waipa Valley for Whakarewarewa. There in the open ground Kura' once more all but seized the flying Hatupatu. Just at the foot of Pohaturoa hill, which makes a green background for the steam clouds from the geysers and hot springs of Whakarewarewa, the young man, as he dashed down the valley, came to a great boiling pool of white churning mud. This was the sulphur-belching pool called Whanga-pipiro. He leaped across it safely and went racing on. But Kura-Ngaituku, flying after him,
plop! into the horrible pool. Down she sank; the boiling, heaving porridge-like white mud closed over her fierce feathered head, and that was the last of Kura-of-the-Claws.
The rejoicing Hatu', thus ridden of his terrible witch of the forest, went on his way to the lake. On the shore of Rotorua, near the place which we now call Sulphur Point, he rested and decked his head with a chaplet of green leaves, then, plunging into the lake, he turned his face toward the island of Mokoia, where his parents lived. He dived, and swam under water to the island. Halfway across, or rather through the lake, he paused to eat a meal of kakahi, the fresh-water bivalve; then he swam on again. The spot where he halted for his watery feast is known to this day as “Te Mauri-ohorere-a-Hatupatu.” (“The startled soul of Hatupatu.”) It is a long white rock on the bottom of the lake, between Ohinemutu and Mokoia. A mortal cannot look on that magic rock with impunity; to see it is a tohu-maté, a portent of approaching death. Should a canoe crew be paddling over that spot, and the paddlers, incautiously looking
Mauri then they or some of their kindred will surely shortly die.
Hatupatu leaped gladly upon the shore of Mokoia Island, home from his great adventures, and as he landed he threw down his wet head-chaplet of foliage. The branchlets took root and grew and they became those pohutukawa trees which grow so grandly on the shore of the sacred island. And in his later adventures, when he followed the war-path and performed many marvellous deeds, he twined his head for the home-coming with green leaves, which grew into trees, such as that tawa yonder in the haunted grove. And noblest of all is the totara which sprang from a sprig that he wore returning from a war expedition over the forest ranges beyond the Rotoiti-Rotoma chain of lakes. A score of generations has passed since Hatupatu the wonder-worker set that tender tree there, to adorn the hillside of beautiful Mokoia, and to-day when the soft hau-matangi, the sweet breeze from the north, stirs its tall head of fadeless green, it whispers the magic-meaning name of Hatupatu.
These Maori legends of human beings carried off by strange creatures of the forest suggest a far-away birthplace. Sir Hugh Clifford, in his tales of the Malay Peninsula, tells a singular story, as related by the Dyaks, or a man who was captured by a female mais, or orangutan, and borne off by her to her home in the tree-tops, as a mate. The Elopement of Chaling the Dyak has more than one feature in common with the tale of Hatupatu, and the tradition of Kura-ngaituku may have been a folk-memory traceable back to the jungles of Indonesia.
Kura-ngaituku's Rock, as it is called, is to be seen to this day, on the right-hand or south side of the track to Roto-kakahi through the Pareuru valley. It is a great flat-topped rock of dark-grey rhyolite, half-buried in the fern; its upper surface, lichen-grown is marked with a series of fissures or cuts, as described. Like the enchanted rock at the foot of Ngatuku Hill, on the Waikato River, this huge stone was an uruuru-whenua, and the Maoris on passing it were accustomed to lay offerings of fern and leaves on it, in obeisance to the spirit or genius loci.
A similar ceremony was performed at the sacred boiling mud pool Whanga_pipiro, in which Kura-ngaituku perished. The ancient track from Rotorua up the Waipa valley passed the puia, and offerings were made here by travellers to placate the spirit of the place. The wayfarer dropped a branch of fern, manuka, or raurekau into the steaming cauldron, repeating the short charm, “Mau e kai te manawa o tauhou,” a karakia meaning “O spirit of the earth, feed thou on the heart of the stranger.” If this rite were omitted, say the Maoris, a storm of rain would shortly descend, and punish the wayfarer for his neglect.
“Kwee, kwee, kwee, tio-o-o!” came the clear call of the shining-cuckoo in the bush above the track, and we caught a glimpse of the speckly-plumaged chanter, the pipi-wharauroa, as he shifted his perch to a higher branch of a native fuchsia tree, where the konini berries hung in thick clusters. A tui let fall a liquid chuckle now and again, by way of expressing satisfaction with his forest fare. The sunlit edge of the bush was alive with birds, native and pakeha. It was a delectable spot for them, this belt of small timbers between the lake and the tall woods of the hills. And from where we sat, the Old Man of Tuhourangi and I, we had a high look-out over a water-sheet of a mystical quality of beauty, of a loneliness and a silence almost wizardly.
Nothing moved on its level glimmerglass; no trout leaped for the flies; the thickets that rimmed its half-moon bays of glittering pumice sand were clamorous with bird life, but no wings winnowed the air above its
kawau dived for fish. For all its lonely calm it did not seem to lie asleep, but rather to be crouching there, some liquid spirit of the woods, with peering blue eye in its deep hollow, waiting.
The Old Man, the head chief of the tribe which had been driven from its home at Te Wairoa by the Tarawera eruption thirty years before, was telling some of the stories of the old Lakeland. The very ground on which we sat, he said, was tapu, or rather had been until the Government ran a road right across it to give access to its New Forest reserves, where prison labour was clothing the hills with great plantations of exotic pines. This spot was the narrow ridge between Roto-Kakahi, the Lake of Shellfish, on the one hand, and Tikitapu, the Lake of the Sacred Image, on the other. We could look down into both lakes; so closely set together and yet so different in character; the one long and winding and island-studded, and of a luminous green in hue; the other an almost circular expanse of magical colour that sometimes was steel-blue, sometimes turquoise, with the play of sun and cloud.
This neck of land, said Mita of
tuahu or altar, “Te Tuahu a Tuameke.” It was the descendants of Apu-moana, of Tarawera, who slew this Merlin of the Maori country; they found him in the midst of his dreadful incantations, standing naked before his sacred fire. They ate his body; his heart was reserved as an offering to the god Maru, and it sizzled in the flames on the tohunga's own earthen altar.
The whitebeard chief's memory was stored with countless legends of pa and lake and forest, and with curious tales of magic, such as the story of the enchanted red-pine log, “Te Mata-o-Tapotu,” which went cruising like some living thing about the two lakes—it was believed that a subterranean passage connected them. But strangest of all was the saga of Kataore, the terrible ngarara or dragon that lived on the shores of this lake of wizardly beauty, Tikitapu, and preyed on the passing traveller.
ngarara and taniwha by referring them back to the ancient homes of the Maori in crocodile-haunted Indonesia or Papua or the western Pacific. But there are people who do not believe in fairies and who take a fiendish delight in demolishing the children's Santa Claus. Out with them; here in the very heart of the country of witches and faerie we will have none of their wooden-hearted criticism.
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High up yonder, on the steep forested ranges across Lake Tikitapu—its western side—was the darksome cave of Kataore the dragon. (So went Mita's legend.) Those ranges, the wooded hills, Rauporoa and Te Pou-Koropu, swell up westward, still into the mountain of Moerangi. They are divided by a deep gully—we can see it from here, a narrow gash in the hills, like a great earthquake rift, where the rimu and rata trees touch branches across the ravine. The Pou-koropu was a famous mountain for birds in olden days; the very name is a reminder of the bird-hunters of the vanished race, Ngati-Tangaroa-Mihi. The pou was a pole set in a bird-haunted
kaka parrot was tied as a decoy. The kaka's harsh scream, “Nge-nge-nge,” quickly brought its inquisitive wild kindred about it from the surrounding trees, and as each alighted it was struck down with a stick by the hidden hunter. And up yonder, in the bird-swarming woods and gulches, lived Kataore, the scaly spiny-backed monster who scorned to go kaka or pigeon-hunting, for his food was Man.
This terrible reptile, strangely enough, was not without a rangatira or owner. Kataore was the pet, so to say, of the chief Tangaroa-mihi, who lived here in the fort Pa-Tarata, set like a castle above the Sacred Lake. A ferocious kind of pet? Well, and why not? Do not the pakehas cage up lions and tigers and other savage beasts (asked the Old Man)—aye, and fearful great snakes!—in their public gardens and parks? Tangaroa had his wild park, these forests of Te Pou-Koropu and Rauporoa, and in their depths roamed his ngarara-mokai, Kataore. This dragon of the bush had not always been a monster of ferocity. Once
pakeha knows the place as Tikitapu bush to-day; the motor road goes through the beautiful forest of rimu pine and tawa and flowering rata. He would creep down from his cave along a broad track which he had worn through the undergrowth; and there, just where the pathway left the sandy shore of the lake to enter the dark forest, he had his waiting-place. He would spy a solitary traveller from afar—aye, he could smell him, as a deer scents the hunter—and here he would lie flattened to the earth, his dark scaly back and his terrible snout hidden in
And as the dragon grew bolder he began to attack groups and parties of people making their way by the lakeside route between Te Wairoa and Rotorua.
So huge was he that he swallowed his victims whole; and everything went into his maw—weapons, clothing, the backloads of food carried by the slaves and women, everything went the same way; and then the surfeited Kataore would slumber in his evil-smelling cave until the desire for man-meat sent him prowling forth again.
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Now it befell one day that a beautiful girl named Tuhi-Karaparapa, whose home was at Lake Tarawera, set out along this bush track for Rotorua. She was a descendant of the great chief Apu-moana, of Tarawera, and she was journeying to Ohinemutu village in order to be married to Reretoi, a young
puhi, or sacred maiden; she was the treasure of her tribe, and the fame of her beauty had gone abroad to many a village. On her journey to Rotorua she was accompanied by a party of relatives and a number of slaves bearing loads of presents such as finely-woven garments of flax, and dogskin and feather robes, for the people of Ohinemutu.
The party had just passed up from the silent brink of Tikitapu lake into the shades of the forest when the dreadful Kataore suddenly hurled himself upon them from the trackside. With one snap of his terrible jaws he killed the lovely Tuhi; then he attacked and slew several of her attendants, felling some with great blows of his serrated tail. But some there were who escaped, and these, flying on wings of terror to Rotorua, spread the news of the fearful end of the beautiful maid of Tarawera.
Reretoi, the bereaved lover, at once raised an expedition to avenge the slaying of Tuhi and her people. There were many who greatly desired to kill the monster of Tikitapu,
utu in retaliation for the murders and the eatings, but they desired also to feast upon Kataore for the pleasure of tasting his flesh. Some of them had already killed and eaten a similar creature called Te Ika o Hotupuku (“Hotupuku's Fish”) at the Kapenga, over there south-eastward, in the direction of the Waikato River; they found that its meat was sweet. They had also killed a dragon or taniwha, called Pekehaua, whose den was in the deep spring which is the source of the river Awahou, flowing into Rotorua Lake; and its flesh was delicious to the palate of the Maori. Therefore they went a-hunting for Kataore with keen anticipations of revenge and feasting combined.
One of Reretoi's brother-warriors was a young man named Pitaka, who was a noted slayer of these taniwhas and ngararas. It was he who had descended into the deep fount of the Awahou, called Te Warouri, in a taiki, a kind of diving-cage, made of supplejack and other strong forest vines, from which he noosed the slumbering Pekehaua in his watery den. Pitaka and
The Ngati-Tama hunters marched over the hills to the Rauporoa forest; they scouted cautiously down to the shores of the Sacred Lake, and camped in the shades of the Tu-wiriwiri thickets.
Here they made their preparations for the capture of the dragon. They plaited long and strong ropes of flax, and these ropes they arranged in the form of mahanga or snares, with running loops. The noosed mahanga they then set in a place which they believed, from the signs of the frequent passage of the monstrous body, would be traversed by the ngarara when he came rushing down from his cave in the gloomy gorges of the precipitous Pou-Koropu. One end of each mahanga was made fast there, to trees on one side of the trail; the running ends were held by a band of strong men from Rotorua, all warriors of the Ngati-Tama tribe.
Now, when all was ready, out dashed that brave young man Pitaka, the slayer of Pekehaua. He was stripped for the work, and the blue tattoo stood out beautifully on his well-oiled skin. He carried a hardwood taiaha, half spear, half sword; his hair was
maunu,” the human bait to draw the monster from its cave. Leaping from side to side, making cuts and guards with his taiaha, his eyes wildly glaring in warrior defiance, he boldly challenged the hidden man-eater.
“Tena, tena!” he called, as he scouted up to the cave. “Haere mai, haere mai!” “Now, now, come out, come out!” And he pukana'd — made terrific grimaces — and shouted insults and taunts, all with the intent of provoking Kataore to issue from his dwelling in the cliff-side.
Presently, out burst the dragon, angered by Pitaka's taunts, furious to slay and eat the impudent intruder into his domain. Down he rushed along the track which he had made to the place of ambuscade in the bush below. He ponderously pursued his now fleeing bait, who ran straight towards where Reretoi and his men lay in concealment on either side of the track. The dragon's enormous jaws snapped; he lashed his great tail from side to side. He ran blundering straight towards the snares spread ready for him.
Then Pitaka's voice was heard in a great shout. “Takiritia! Takiritia!” he loudly called.
It was the cry to his comrades to feign a retreat, in order to lead the foe into the ambuscade.
And Reretoi's voice now was heard, as the monster's body entered the nooses—“Tarorea! Tarorea!” (“Make fast the snare!”)— bidding the warriors haul away on the line and secure their quarry. They ran away with the ropes, took a quick turn round a big tree with each, and there the man-eating ngarara struggled, securely caught by the loop round the middle of his great scale-armoured body.
Tremendously he twisted and wriggled and heaved to get free, and smashed his tail against the trees and shrubs. He was firmly held; his struggles only drew the slip-knots tighter.
The warriors dashed upon him with their weapons. Reretoi, Pitaka, and Purahokura —they were the chief men of the assailants. With their hardwood broadswords and spears and stone axes, their sharp-edged clubs of stone and whalebone, Ngati-Tama hacked and lunged at the captive monster.
Then came the cutting-up of the monster, as sailors cut up a captured shark. With knives and axes of obsidian and flint they laid bare its hideous belly; and then rose a great aue! of wonder and grief as they beheld lying there, heaps of bones of human beings, and there, too, the head of the missing girl Tuhi; they recognized it by the uncommonly long masses of hair. Garments of flax and dogskin and feathers, too, they saw in the dragon's maw, and even the stone patus or hand-clubs of sundry men whom he had overwhelmed and devoured.
So died that murderous habitant of the Pou-Koropu cliffs. The warriors sought for his heart, which was cut out and brought across to the sacred place close to where we are sitting, this ridge of the Ahi-manawa, and here it was cooked and eaten by the priests as an offering to the gods. This was because of the tapu girl whom he had killed and eaten. As for the ngarara's
ito, or object of revenge, in retaliation for the many people whom the creature had slain. And parts of the flesh were potted in calabashes and sent to Rotorua, so that all the tribe were able to feast upon the body of that much-hated dragon of the wilds.
The only person who was not pleased at this retribution exacted by Ngati-Tama was the chief who owned the dragon—Tangaroa-Mihi, head-man of the Tikitapu district. He would not believe that Kataore was so dangerous a creature. The truth was that the dragon was so cunning a fellow that whenever Tangaroa-Mihi came to visit him and bring him food, as was his wont, he behaved with exceeding mildness, like a well-trained pet dog. So Tangaroa wept long for his slain saurian protégé, and then he rose and called his tribe together, and they made war upon the people of Rotorua, and many battles followed and palisaded forts were taken by storm, and there was much slaying, and eating of men; and all because of this rascally ngarara.
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The Old Man rose and pointed with his stick to the precipitous forest-hung side of
“Straight over yonder,” he said, “in the darkest part of the woods, where the rocks arch overhead in a cavern, is the dwelling of that fellow Kataore. Some of our young men from Whakarewarewa have sought for it when out there shooting pigeons and hunting wild pigs, but none of them have been able to find the cave, it is so concealed by the close-growing trunks and the great roots of the trees. But I know it, I have been in the cave. And we shall go up there some day and enter it together, and maybe we shall camp there, so that we will be able to say we have slept in the cave of the dragon. For I have the incantations that will prevent anything from troubling us there; and anyhow, when ngarara and taniwha are killed that is the end of them; they don't leave ghosts behind them.”
“This is where the wizard's house stood,” said Tamarahi, as we came to the brow of the hill at the Wairoa, the buried village above the west end of Lake Tarawera. The lake spread out below, flat, shining, motionless; beyond, the mightily-scarped battlements of Mount Tarawera gloomed over the waters, sinister, shattered heights of rhyolite. Near the edge of the bluff there was a little level space, indicating the site of one of the old-style dug-out huts, half-subterranean, for warmth in winter.
“This is where Tuhoto Ariki lived,” said my companion; “Tuhoto the last of the great magicians and wonder-workers of the Arawa. Here he was dug out by the rescue-party after the eruption of Tarawera, when Wairoa was buried deep under mud and stones and when a hundred of Tuhourangi perished beneath that volcanic rain—truly the rain of the gods. For it was Tuhoto's ancestor the Atua who sent that awful rain to punish and destroy the people of the Wairoa.”
Tuhoto, the Ariki, he who had the powers of the air and the underworld at his command, lived there all alone in his little whare, dreaded, hated by his kinsfolk, for he had the evil eye, and none would venture near him. It was he who brought about the destruction of Wairoa and the devastation of the surrounding country in the fearful outburst of Tarawera. Pakeha science may not support this, but what does the pakeha know about makutu and the power of calling dread spirits from the sky and from the earth? Listen to the Maori story, as we rest here on this lofty look-out place, with the cliff-bordered Lake Tarawera spread out before us and the grim scarred old mountain that made all this trouble lifting his rock palisades and his ruined crown nearly four thousand feet into the sky ten miles away.
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The tale of Tarawera begins long before that eruption of 1886: indeed it takes us back five centuries to Tamaohoi, the atua, the genius loci of the Mountain, whom Tuhoto invoked. This Tamaohoi, say Tuhourangi, was the first inhabitant of Tarawera; it was he who gave the name to the lake and peak. He was a chief of the
tangata-whenua, the ancient people of the land, the tribes who inhabited New Zealand before the Maori sailing canoes of the last historic migration had crossed the Pacific to these islands. Like many another remote ancestor he is accredited with the power of a god. Tamaohoi was a ferocious cannibal and was accustomed to waylay and kill and eat passing travellers. He lived on the shores of the lake below the steep scarps of the mountain when Ngatoro-i-rangi, the high priest of the Arawa canoe, landed at Maketu with his followers and explored the country southward to Taupo and Tongariro. Tamaohoi's man-eating habits angered Ngatoro-i-rangi, who decided that the ogre chief of the tangata-whenua would be best below ground. So going to Tarawera, he stamped upon the mountain-top and formed a huge waro or chasm. Into this, by virtue of incantations and his sacred priestly powers, he caused Tamaohoi to descend. He literally stamped Tamaohoi into the waro and then closed it over him; and there the cannibal son of the soil remained as the demon and presiding genius of the mountain.
There Tamaohoi slept in the heart of the slumbering fire-mountain; and in the recesses
tapu in course of generations enveloped Tarawera's forested head. But at last Tamaohoi was called from his dark waro to work a deed of vengeance.
Tuhoto, old warlock that he was, had incurred the dislike of his tribe, who treated him unkindly and went on with their merry drinking and dancing ways, scornful of the venerable wizard and his warnings. He saw the ruin of Tuhourangi demoralised by the pakeha's grog, the young women debauched; a tribe fast going to perdition to make the pakeha tourist's holiday. And to avenge his injuries and to punish a thoughtless drunken people, he set the spell of death on Te Wairoa. He betook him to his pagan prayers; he uttered his most potent incantations, the fatal magic of the makutu. and he called upon Ruaimoko and Tamaohoi, the spirits of the volcano, to punish the wicked kainga.
The people were not without warnings of their fate. The waters of the lake rose and subsided in an unaccountable manner; and some days before the catastrophe the phantom canoe was seen on Tarawera's
matakité, those of the wise and understanding eye—the ghostly warcanoe which was wont to appear before some tribal disaster, gliding across the waters towards the funeral mountain, with its double row of occupants, one row paddling, the other standing wrapped in their flax robes, their heads bowed, their hair plumed as for death with the feathers of the huia and the white heron—these were the souls being ferried to the mountain of the dead.
But all the omens and all Tuhoto's dark words passed unheeded; and suddenly in that black midnight the earthquakes shook the land, lightnings flashed, a great wind passed in a hurricane that burst over the mountains, and with an awful roar Wahanga and Ruawahia, the northern and middle peaks of Tarawera, burst forth in huge black clouds and fireballs and showers of red-hot rock and ash. The mountains were rent in twain; lightnings set the forests on fire; and then the enormous rift made by the bursting of Tarawera split down into Rotomahana lake. The whole lake—water, mud, islets, wonderful terraces and all—was blown into the air with the roar of all the world's artillery. Thousands
pakehas, and the whole country as far as the eye could see was covered in a dreadful coat of grey.
Thus perished Te Wairoa's people, by the hand of the volcano gods. As for Tuhoto, was it not enough for Tuhourangi that after the four days he had spent entombed he was uncovered alive, smiling grimly, mumbling his magic karakia? Tamaohoi had shielded his tohunga descendant from the death-blow dealt to the tribe, sufficient proof that the wizard was the agent in the destruction of the Wairoa.
Yes, for four days and nights the ancient wizard was buried in his low-roofed thatched hut, covered with volcanic ejecta. Yet he was dug out alive, to the amazement of the search parties and lived for some days afterwards. He said he was in the Reinga, the spirit world, when the digging party let daylight
pakehas went to much trouble to keep the tohunga alive. They carried him into the Rotorua Government Sanatorium, where he was carefully tended by doctors and nurses. He was a hundred years old, but he might have lived longer, say the Maoris, had not the Sanatorium people sheared off his long white hair. As everyone knows, it is a very serious matter indeed to cut a tohunga's hair. So the ancient wizard died; and he was buried with the rites of the Christian Church, and never did his spirit return to trouble the Arawa. But he had wrought them woe enough; and to this day the site of the buried village is tapu through and through. Wairoa is green and beautiful again with grass and foliage and flower; but the ban is on it to
Tamaohoi was no mythical personage. He has descendants living at Rotorua today. I have a whakapapa or genealogical list from Tamaohoi down to a member of the Ngati-Tu tribe, of Ngapuna, containing the following names in direct descent: Tamaiewa (son of Tamaohoi), Te Rakau-pango, Te Upoko, Paha, Ikapuku, Te-Rangi-tupu-ki-waho, Tahu Whakatiki, Upoko, Te Rua, Te Rangi-ka-tuho, Te Whakarau, Tauhuroa, whose son is Hohepa Tauhuroa (now about fifty-five years of age).
All the men on this list preceding Tauhuroa are said to have been wizards and priests, possessed of strange powers of necromancy and skilled in makutu, the black art.
Literally, Tarawera may be interpreted as “Burnt Peak.” In this sense the name is particularly applicable to the mountain, and was descriptively correct even before the eruption of 1886. Tarawera proper is the abrupt-shattered peak overlooking Lake Rotomahana. The middle peak is the Rua-wahia (“Chasm burst open”) and the eastern one Wahanga (“Split” or “Divided”). All three names bear reference to the volcanic origin of the mountain. The place where Ngatoro-i-rangi, according to the legend, forced Tamaohoi into the earth to be a demon of the underworld is on the summit of Ruawahia. Before the eruption there were warm springs there, in the forest which originally clothed the mountain.
The traveller crossing the great tussock prairie of Southland in the direction of Lake Manapouri observes with growing interest a group of fantastically toothed and notched blue peaks rise on the rolling western horizon. As the car speeds round the northern side of the range he sees that it is a curious detached mountain set there like a vast uneven table-top on the forestless plains. Its form, too, as he goes on may suggest a huge capsized ark, with ragged uneven keel, and that fancy indeed will agree with Maori mythology. This mountain massif of singularly significant outline, its sawedge summits etched in rich blue against the sky, was once compared by an American traveller to the Sierras of New Mexico. To the southern Maori it is the upturned hull of his Pilgrim Ship from the tropic isles of Polynesia. Six centuries ago the sailingcanoe Takitimu, the principal vessel of the straggling fleet whose Eastern Pacific crews
waka, set there forever to tell of our hither-coming, the landing here of our Waitaha forefathers.”
A significant legend that for the scientist perhaps; for this fanciful legend may crystallise a reference to an era—it may be not very remote in geological time—when the ocean flowed over what are now the plains of Murihiku and washed the wide-spread feet of the Takitimu.
Like many another prominent and classic mountain, Takitimu has its legends of the fairy people, the Patu-paiarehe and the
Maero. Giants of the mist peopled this strange tossed-up land; uncanny folk haunted its woody ravines and its shallow caveshelters in the weathered cliffs.
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Hautapu was out hunting weka, the fat flightless woodhen, on the slopes of Takitimu mountain. He was a man of the Manapouri lakeside hapu, a tall lithe fellow with the muscles of a wrestler, the shoulders of a strong canoeman. His dark face was tattooed in a fashion unfamiliar to the Maori of to-day. Four straight horizontal blue lines, deeply incised, ran across his cheeks and nose; he looked out as from behind bars. Short vertical lines were cut in mid-brow. This style of adornment was the moko-a-Tamatea the ancient tattooing pattern of the Takitimu's captain and priest, brought from the tropic islands of the far north-east; its like is to be seen to-day in the Marquesas. Hautapu's garments were mats of flax, a thick and shaggy shoulder cape of roughly dressed flax and a kilt of similar material. On his feet he wore paraerae, plaited sandals for the stony places, made from the tough sword leaves of
ti or cabbage-tree. A white-haired dog with long pointed fox-like head and bushy tail followed at his heels.
As Hautapu came to the western foot of Takitimu he passed a long reedy pool where wild ducks swam in little squadrons, and dived for tiny fish. A snow-white kotuku, the New Zealand heron, its long legs outstretched, flapped up from the margin of the lagoon and winged its slow flight over his head. He saw other of its kind standing in the shallow water at the far end of the marsh, silent as shadows, waiting to dart a long knife-like beak.
“Spirit birds,” said the Maori; “they companion our dead in the Reinga. Yet they are good to eat;” and he set to at twisting stout cabbage-tree snares (tauhere rau-ti) which he fastened to bunches of rushes in the little channels near the shore. He went about his work leisurely and methodically and when he had finished, a score of loop-snares set here and there along the shores awaited any heedless kotuku. Other snares he cunningly arranged by tying bunches of growing green rushes in running nooses across the narrow swimming ways at just the height of a duck's head
parera.
Leaving the pool of the waterbirds, Hautapu began the ascent of Takitimu mountain. The great range rises to between five thousand and six thousand feet above sea level. As he climbed upward he came to a kind of broad terrace, covered with snow grass. Here he stayed awhile looking back on the beautiful lake lying in glimmering breadths of steel-blue between its woody mountains in the west, Moturau, the Lake of a Hundred Islands, which the blundering pakeha mapmakers set down as “Manapouri.” At the eastern end of the isle-dotted lake, where the Waiau River issued in a smooth shining curve, he saw thin blue coils of smoke rising; that way lay the homes of his people. The grassy terrace fell to a sheltered shallow saucer of wooded land; above rose the severe slant of the main range. Hautapu exploring this depression, a kind of dimple in the mountain face, perceived that it would be a convenient camping place; if hunting were good he would stay some days on Takitimu. Through this saucer or dell, termed a hapua by the Maori, a brook of water flowed, forming a
Whio, the blue mountain duck, were swimming on the clear cold pond and in the little rapids of the stream. They uttered their hoarse whistling calls, “whi-io, whi-io.”
Here Hautapu halted. With his stone axe he chopped off tree-branches and hacked down bushes and built a little lean-to wharau for night shelter. The dog came trotting in with a weka he had caught; he dropped it at his master's feet. A curious sound came from the thick belt of beech forest that made a dusky fence on three sides of the hapua. The sharp metallic noise resembled, to Hautapu's ear, the striking together of two pieces of greenstone.
“He takahea,” he said to himself, and motioned to the kuri to be off in chase. A takahea would indeed be a prize for the food-hunter; it was the great flightless notornis, a fat blue turkey in appearance, but capable of making greater resistance than a turkey, for its kind had been known by Hautapu to turn on a dog and make fight with the strong heavy beak and claw-armed feet.
The Maori woodsman was about to follow his dog when suddenly his form stiffened into watchful immobility, as his quick eye beheld something in the thick bushes a few yards away. A face in the bushes, a lightskinned face staring at him through the leaves; two great dark gleaming eyes and a glint of coppery hair.
Hautapu was startled, but gripping his axe he dashed into the thicket.
A woman crouched there, too astonished and too terrified to rise from the kneeling position in which she had been gazing at the stranger through the low loophole of foliage. Hautapu seized her by a naked shoulder and drew her to her feet. Now she drew back her head, shook her long masses of hair and straitly returned gaze for gaze. She was a tall, handsome, amazingly fair-skinned young woman; her hair, flowing thickly about her, shone with a ruddy bronze tint in the sun.
“E—e! Taku wahine ataahua!” (“My beautiful wife!”) cried Hautapu. The strange beauty was his captive and, it followed in primitive custom, his wife soon-to-be. His glittering eyes roved over her strong shapely form. Her one garment was a waistmat of fandangling toi leaves, the blades of the
But this wahine tawhiti, this strange, foreign-looking woman, who was she? whence came she? Hautapu loosed his grip of her, in doubt.
“What is your name?” he asked. “Whence came you—where are your people?”
“Kai-heraki,” she replied, “is my name. I have no people, I come of no race, and I know no one. My home is yonder,” and she pointed up the steep mountain side.
“But your tongue is Maori,” said Hautapu.
“I am a Maori,” said the woman, “yet not a Maori. I know many tongues; I know the tongues of the birds. I am the child of the mountain; Takitimu is my mother.”
“He Patu-paiarehe!” muttered Hautapu, as he stood undecidedly regarding his beautiful captive. Truly she was desirable, but there was danger in her beauty. No mortal could safely wed a fairy woman, as she
Hautapu was a tohunga, versed in charms and a knowledge of the propitiatory and death-averting rites and ceremonies of the ancient race.
The hunter grasped his fairy captive's arm and led her out to the little clearing by the lakeside where he had built his bower of branches. He would perform his rite of ta-whakamoe, a priestly ceremonial used to remove baneful spells. This was needful before he could make her his wife.
“Remain here,” he ordered, “and I shall banish the spirits of enchantment. You shall no longer be a fairy woman. You shall be my wife and in this wharau you shall repose with me.”
The woman stood still, with wondering look, while Hautapu set about making the sacred fire which was necessary to the ta-whakamoe rite. From a flax basket he took his kauati or fire-stick which he carried on hunting expeditions for the purpose of obtaining fire by friction. This was a small flat slab of kaikomako wood, which as all Maoris know contains the seed-sparks
kaunoti, a sharp-pointed stick of tawa wood; this was the rubbing stick.
“Set your foot on the end of the kauati and keep it steady,” he told the woman as he placed the slab on the ground.
Kai-heraki the fairy did as she was bidden, and Hautapu set to at his fire-kindling, rubbing the hard pointed stick vigorously to and fro along a groove in the flat kauati. The shavings and dust collected at the end of the groove presently began to smoke and then burst into a tiny flame. The woman gasped with amazement at the wonderful sight—for fairies are strangers to fire. A spark fell on her bare foot, which straightway began to spurt a thin stream of blood—for such is the effect of fire on the Patupaiarehe.
In an instant the terrified Kai-heraki turned and raced for the safe shelter of the bush.
After her leaped Hautapu. He crashed through the shrubs in pursuit and seized the frightened quivering woman. Bringing her back to the lakeside he resumed the raising
Once more the little flame burst forth in the tinder of the kauati. Hautapu set about building the sacred fire for the ta-whakamoe.
For a moment his attention left Kaiheraki and in that moment she made another dash for freedom.
Like a bird flying from the snare of the fowler she raced for the safety of the friendly forest. In an instant she had gone, with only the shaking bushes to show where she had plunged into the dusk of the woods.
With an angry shout Hautapu ran in pursuit of his woman. He tore into the forest, crying on her to stop. No sign could he find of her. She had vanished completely.
For hours he ran on in chase, calling her name. Once indeed he thought he saw her, on the edge of a steep declivity, but next moment she had vanished.
Now came rolling down a mountain fog. It grew thick and more thick. Dense swirling masses of vapour surged about him.
In gloom and anger he returned to his camping place. Kai-heraki had vanished for ever from his eyes. Well he knew now that the gods would never permit him to wed the fairy woman of the mountains.
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That was the first and last that Hautapu saw of the strange beauty of the witchmountain. But it may be that Kai-heraki still roves her immemorial hills. The Maoris say she haunts the ranges; the spectrelike form of the wahine-tawhiti is seen on heavy still days of cloud and fog, striding like a giantess along the sides of misty Takitimu.
The South Island Maori of old-time who ventured inland to the shores of Lake Wakatipu was in a land of many and grave enchantments. The overpowering character of the landscape made him ready to perceive the hand of the gods in everything. The dark-blue, immensely deep lake, coiled like a huge ngarara or water-reptile between its lofty mountain ramparts, the fantastically carven crags, worn by storm play and ages of weathering into the strangest of turrets, pinnacles, spear-blades, needle points; the marvellous and ever-changing play of colour on the sky-piercing palisades, the eerie voices of the gale in the peaks and the mysterious sounds of the wilderness known to those who have travelled and camped in such high desolate places, all sank into the soul of primitive man. All Nature was to him alive. He heard spirit voices about him as he explored the snow-grass heights and paddled his mokihi over unfathomed depths. Mystery and wizardry were about him in
Atua and he was quick to build poetic folk-talk about the wondrous region. In time, too, there gathered a certain truth about those tribal tales, when refugees and maybe savage recluses made their homes in the intractable lands, avoiding, save in the way of raid and ambuscade, the faces of their fellow-Maori.
“See!” said the Maori, “how the spade of our ancestor Rakaihaitu scooped out these lakes.” It was a poetic fancy veiling a geological truth. The legend was that the far-roving Polynesian navigator Rakaihaitu, who landed on these shores well-nigh a thousand years ago, travelled through this South Island, Te-Waka-a-Maui, forming lakes with his colossal ko, the ancient digging-implement. Wakatipu was his crowning effort. Setting his foot on the ko-rest and putting forth all his godlike powers and uttering potent charms, he hollowed out this fifty-mile-long channel in the
ko was the ice-plough, the glaciers which excavated with irresistible gouging-power this tremendous trough of the Alps.
The rainbow's glory was to the Maori the veritable aria or visible form of his god Kahukura or Uenuku. Gazing out from the lake-end at Takerehaka, where a little village of thatched huts, half-underground, stood under the lee of an ancient glacial moraine, he saw Uenuku's bright arched image spanning the eastern mountains, and with fine inspiration he called those craggy ranges Tapuae-'nuku, which means “The Footsteps of the Rainbow God.” He invested with fairy legendry the steeply slanting mountains on either hand, but more particularly those on the left or western side of the South Arm.
Their mist-wreathed heights and rifted recesses he peopled with Patu-paiarehe and Maeroero. Forever hearing strange sounds and reading omens in sky and cloud, he cared not to venture over-close to the haunts of those uncanny beings. On gloomy and misty days when the fog descended
waiatas, and calling in ghostly voices one to another across the ravines; heard too, the voices of fairy children singing and laughing; the plaintive music of the koauau, the nose-flute, and the sweet notes of the putorino.
But there were also the maeroero, uncouth and savage beings, the wild men of the mountains, whose bodies were covered with long hair, and whose finger-nails grew so long that they were talons, with which they speared their prey.
Over yonder in the eastern elbow of the lake, at the foot of the grandest and most savage crags of all, the shark's teeth range of the Remarkables, cutting the skyline more than six thousand feet above the blue-black waters, there lived the chief of all the Maeroero, a strange and dreaded creature called Kopuwai or “Water-Swallower.” Indeed he was not so much a Maeroero as a Tipua or demon; in form he was horrible, half-man, half-reptile. This monstrous ogre dwelt in a cave at the outflow of the lake, the swift Kawarau stream, which feeds the
mokihi. Her companions he seized and ate, and her he took to his cave. To prevent her escape when he slept, he fastened her by a flax rope, one end of which he plaited into her hair; the other end he tied to one of his legs, plated with scales like a huge saurian reptile. For many days Kaiamio endured her fearful lot, watching always for a chance of escape. At last the opportunity came when the Tipua slept heavily after a feast on human flesh. Quickly the woman unplaited her end of the line and fastened it to some plants that grew in front of the cave. Then she launched a small mokihi of light, dry raupo reeds and korari or flax-flower stalks, and in great joy plied her paddle down the fast-flowing Matau. The ogre, half awakening, tugged the rope once or twice, as was his habit, to assure himself that Kaiamio was there, and feeling the line
But Kaiamio was by this time far down the river, paddling for her life, and soon she was in safety in a village of her people near the mouth of the Matau, telling the marvellous story of her escape from the demon of the mountain-land.
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The old man Hone te Paina, of part Ngati-Mamoe blood, many years ago told me this legend of the haunted mountains of Wakatipu. Hone lived at Oraka, a little village on the foggy shore of Foveaux Strait, in the extreme south of the South Island. In his youth he had been at Takere-haka, the Ngai-Tahu settlement at the south end of Wakatipu. There on the lake shore for some time lived his elder kinsman Paitu, a chief and sometime warrior of Ngai-Tahu and Ngati-Mamoe. Now, there was
weka or woodhen. The weka were in great abundance on the shores of Wakatipu, and when they were fat with feeding on the berries of various shrubs Paitu spent many days each season in the days of his youth in hunting them for food. The elder people at Takerehaka (where the township of Kingston now stands, on the lake-edge) warned him and his young companions not to cross a certain stream at the foot of the mountains on the west side of the South Arm. Beyond that stream, they said, was the home of the maeroero, the wild cragsmen, who lived in the dark overhanging cliffs. “You may hear the cry of the weka among the rocks and ravines on the other side of that little river,” they warned the bird-hunter, “but beware—the maero will have you if you cross.”
Paitu went out hunting weka one night with his dog, which had been trained to stalk and seize the birds without barking. He came to the forbidden stream and hearing the high wailing call of the weka on the other side he waded to the opposite bank, quite forgetful of the warning from the wise old
kaika. With his dog in leash he stalked the bird, which was feeding on a clump of mikimiki bushes, covered with ripe berries. As he approached he raised his turutu call, imitating the cry of the weka, to entice it closer. The lure-cry was answered by the woodhen, which left the bushes, in its curiosity, and came towards the spot where Paitu crouched in the low shrubs. The hunter quietly released his dog which sprang upon the weka.
Next moment there was a quick yelp of terror from the kuri, which darted back to Paitu, trembling and whining. From the gloom came a strange unearthly croaking voice, “E—e! Taku weka momona!” (“Aha, my fat woodhen!”) It was the maero.
Paitu stayed not in that haunted spot. With hair a-bristle, like his dog's, and with fear gripping his heart, he raced for the stream and dashed through it to the southern side, where he was safe. The weka he left to the maero. He and his dog hunted no more that night; in haste and fear they sought the shelter of the village and by the dancing firelight in the communal sleeping-hut Paitu recounted the thrilling happening of the night.
Never again did he venture to cross the boundary stream to the haunted places.
The pakeha's sheep now graze on those windy, tussock-clad hills. The pakeha name for the mountains of the wild fairies is the Eyre Range with Mount Dick towering high above Takere-haka bay, and again beyond are the spiked pinnacles and knife-blades of the Bayonet Peaks. The Maori long has gone, but some of his legends and his names remain, and Hone te Paina gives the name of those mountains of the furtive folk as Nga-Puke-Maeroero, the “Hills of the Wild Fairy Men.”Printed by Whitcombe and Tombs Limited g41531