Makutu: Avenging by Black Magic.

The King Country was freed from the Aukati closure in 1883. Three years later my brother and I, riding through Otorohanga in a search for strayed horses, saw the raupo hut in which the outlaw had been drugged and captured. It was deserted; no one would enter it again. The King Country Maoris were still indignant at the kohuru (treachery) of the Barlows, and half-castes were highly unpopular in the Rohepotae for a long time to come. The most powerful tohunga in the country was at work with his spells of avengement.

“That house is tapu,” old Hopani told me at Otorohanga. “That is where the tohunga whom you knon began his rites of makutu to avenge upon Barlow the hanging of Winiata. He sent secretly to Mangere and procured some of Barlow's clothing and portions of food, and through these he worked. He called upon the gods to cause death, even at a distance; and Barlow knows, and he is dying now.”

And it was so. Barlow's £500 Government blood money profited him little. He had bought a small farm at Mangere with his reward, but the curse fell. The once giant frame wasted away to a clothes-rack, a shadow. In a very few years he died. For all his pakeha knowledge and his pride and courage he felt that it was hopeless to combat the arts of Whiro. the Atua of dark deeds. Malignant projection of thought, killing by primitive wireless, auto-suggestion, what you will—the Maori term Makutu covers it all.