The Fairy Mountaineers.

There are tales of fairy foresters. The Maoris call them Patu-paiarche or Turchu (a term which means fairies, enchanted people, furtive woodsmen), and sometimes mohoao, or wild people of the bush. I have a legend of Te Aroha which peoples the mountain with a fairy tribe, whose chief was called Ruatane. He was the chieftain of all the fairy people inhabiting the Colville Range. No doubt these Patu-paiarche were really fugitive tribes of the ancient people who preceded the Hawaiki Maoris in New Zealand. The legend refers to them as a mystic people, skilled in enchantments. Ruatane once seized a woman of the Nati-Matakore tribe, far away in the Rangitoto country, south of the present King Country boundary and bore her off to his village high up on cloudy Aroha. But there was another fairy chief, Tarapikau, whose home was in the Rangitoto Ranges, and he pursued Ruatane, and by stratagem and the exercise of powerful hypnotic charms, which steeped the abductor and his tribe in deep slumber, he recovered the stolen woman and restored her to her tribe.

An angry fairy was Ruatane when he awakened from his heavy sleep, and he made war on Tarapikau, and he hurled from the top of his mountain a burning dart that set fire to a rata tree on which his foe was perched on the top of Rangitoto, fifty miles away!