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Fairy Folk Tales of the Maori

Chapter XV — Hills of the Wild Men

page 165

Chapter XV
Hills of the Wild Men

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 page 166 the night. Most of all the tremendous mountain-scapes of the South Arm made impress upon his imaginative mind. Here, where the great lake is at its narrowest and its deepest, pent between overmastering walls of rock, split and riven in avalanche racetracks, he saw the work of his many 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 page 167 mountains, which filled with water and became a deep and beautiful lake. A scientific truth indeed, for Rakaihaitu's titanic 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 page 168 and enveloped the mountains shooting up five thousand feet above the lake, he heard the fairy people of the crags singing their thin and wailing 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 page 169 Matau or Clutha River. He was a ferocious cannibal; it was his habit to lie in wait for hapless Maori travellers and devour them. Sometimes he captured women, whom he took to wife in his dreadful den, littered with dead men's bones. There was a woman named Kaiamio, one of a party of wayfarers who had crossed the Matau in a raft or 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 page 170 taut he slept again. When at length he rose and discovered the successful stratagem of his slave-wife, he put forth all his monstrous powers and opening his great jaws he attempted to swallow the river and engulf the fleeing woman. He did, indeed, succeed in drinking the upper part of the Matau, and sucked up so much of it that for many leagues the river-bed was laid bare.

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.

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

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 page 171 one great attraction for the olden Maori in this mountain country and that was the 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 page 172 men in the 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.

page 173

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

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