Kaupe

One night in each month, by the account of families who lived under the Koʻolau range, a white mist collects on the highest peak above Nuʻuanu and then stops behaving like weather. It thickens. It takes an edge, and the edge has a muzzle. Every dog in the valley below begins to howl and keeps howling until the shape thins out, and the silence that comes afterward is the part people remember. Nineteenth-century foreigners crossing the same ground wrote down the same sequence, the wailing and then the stillness, without knowing whose name to put to it.

The name is Kaupe. He came from Līhuʻe on Oʻahu, up toward the Waiʻanae mountains, and he belonged to a class of beings the Hawaiians called ʻōlohe. The word means hairless, and it is meant literally: the ʻōlohe were described as bare-skinned, their hide dark red and brindled, their faces the faces of depilated dogs on bodies that were otherwise human. On Maui they were called the Haʻa people, the low ones, for their stature. The Kumulipo places their birth in the fifth wā among the wagging tails, a line with no fixed descent, and David Malo Kupihea, who explained the passage to Martha Beckwith in 1935, said they lived in the sandhills, that they carried the power of kupua in the form of big war dogs, and that they still walked with the Marchers of the Night on Maui, looking like anyone else except for the tail. He also said that a Hawaiian will not touch a hairless dog. It stands for an ʻōlohe.

They were wrestlers and bone-breakers, and they worked the narrow places. A man walking a ridge path between two gulches with the timber ahead of him and no room to turn would hear the loose stones go behind him, and the thing waiting at the pinch of the trail had oiled skin that offered a grip to nobody. Most ʻōlohe in the stories are simply robbers. Kaupe went further than robbery.

He overthrew the government of Ka-hanai-a-ke-akua, the young chief the Menehune had loved well enough to raise him a temple in a single night, and he took the land from Nuʻuanu down to the sea. His own house and heiau stayed at Līhuʻe. He could appear as a man or as a dog whenever it suited him, and he ate people, first on Oʻahu, then across the channel on Maui. He never harmed anyone belonging to the ruling family of the island. That restraint has the flavour of policy rather than mercy, and it is the detail that makes him read less like a monster in the hills and more like a chief with an appetite.

It ended because he overreached. He crossed to Hawaiʻi, took the son of a high chief there, carried the boy back over the water and shut him in the temple at Līhuʻe to be kept until a sacrifice was wanted. The father followed him to Oʻahu, quietly, with no plan beyond dying alongside his son if it came to that, and found Kahilona, the kahuna who kept the Menehune temple of Kaheiki on the slope below what is now Pacific Heights. Kahilona taught him the chants. At night the father came in under the temple wall repeating what he had learned, and the great dog lay asleep across the boy’s fetters, and the cords came loose in his hands while the animal breathed on. They walked out past it saying the same four names over and over. O Kū, O Lono, O Kāne, O Kanaloa. Save us two.

The waking came as a noise from behind them. Kaupe circled his own temple like a whirlwind, found the line they had taken, and went after them on the wind, and no running was going to be enough. The father prayed again and the two of them squeezed under a great stone at Moanalua while the dog, certain they had made for home, ran down to the beach, sprang into the air and flew to Hawaiʻi. The chiefs went back to Kahilona, learned the prayer that kills, sailed home and made war on him there until he was dead. Ka Wai Ola tells it with the battle joined and turning only when the chief remembers the chant, and adds that Kahilona warned him the killing prayer would not work on Oʻahu soil. Both tellings agree on the essential thing. The dog-man was beaten by a better-instructed prayer.

His powers all follow from what he was. A kupua holds two bodies, so shifting between man and dog cost him nothing; the ʻōlohe were wrestlers, so nothing met him hand to hand; his kind ran and leapt beyond ordinary measure, so a channel of open sea was a stride. His limits follow just as directly. He would not touch a high chief, and so the grievance that undid him came from exactly the rank he had been careful to respect. His strength was mana, and mana answers to correct words spoken by someone who has been taught them properly, which is why a father with no weapons and a borrowed chant walked into his temple and walked out again. Beckwith, for what it is worth, notes plainly that man-eating is ascribed to legendary figures and to the ʻōlohe as a class, and that there is no proof cannibalism was ever practised in the Hawaiian islands at all. Man-slaying was common enough. The bone-breaking art was real, and highwaymen used it.

Death did not finish him, because a kupua’s spirit can leave the body before the body is lost. He went back to the head of Nuʻuanu Valley and settled there in his shadow body, sometimes a large dog laid along the ridge, sometimes something very small, and the clouds that gather on those peaks have been read for him ever since. Hawaiians watched such animal shapes in the sky as oila, signs by which an ancestor’s presence could be told. Beckwith records that his cloud form has since been muddled with Poki, a long brindled dog-thing that guards a stretch of road outside Honolulu, whom some people took for the ghost of the chief Boki, who loaded two ships for the sandalwood trade in 1829 and never came back. She thought the dog older than the chief. Modern tellings give Kaupe a voice that imitates an old man or a small child and calls hikers off the trail into bad ground, and warn that it arrives with an unnatural quiet. The petroglyphs of dogs cut along the Nuʻuanu cliffs are far older than that, left by people crossing the pass, and when the Pali tunnels were driven through the ridge the crews had protocols run to keep him and others like him off the works.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Kaupe in Hawaiian mythology?

Kaupe is a kupua, a shapeshifting supernatural being, with the body of a man and the head of a brindled dog. He belonged to the ʻōlohe, a class of hairless dog-men known as wrestlers, bone-breakers and highway robbers, and he was the most famous of them. He seized power in Nuʻuanu Valley on Oʻahu and preyed on the people living there.

How was Kaupe defeated?

Kaupe was defeated by prayer rather than by force. After he kidnapped the son of a chief of Hawaiʻi Island to sacrifice at his temple in Līhuʻe, the boy’s father sought out the kahuna Kahilona at the Kaheiki heiau in Nuʻuanu, who taught him one chant to free the boy and another to destroy Kaupe. The father rescued his son, hid under a rock at Moanalua, and later killed Kaupe on Hawaiʻi Island using the second chant.

Where does Kaupe appear today?

Kaupe is said to remain at the head of Nuʻuanu Valley on Oʻahu, in a shadow body seen in the clouds over the Koʻolau peaks. Witnesses describe a white mist that gathers into the outline of a large dog, sometimes preceded by the howling of every dog in the valley. Martha Beckwith noted that his cloud form has become confused with a separate long brindled dog-spirit called Poki.

What does ʻōlohe mean?

ʻŌlohe means hairless, and it describes the bare dark red and brindled skin of the dog-men to whom Kaupe belonged. The same word is used for skilled practitioners of the Hawaiian bone-breaking art of lua, who plucked their hair and oiled their bodies so an opponent could get no grip, though the dog ʻōlohe are traced to a different genealogy in the Kumulipo.

Was cannibalism really practised in Hawaiʻi?

No. Martha Beckwith states plainly in Hawaiian Mythology that although man-eating is ascribed to legendary figures such as Kaupe and to the ʻōlohe as a class, there is no proof cannibalism was ever practised in the Hawaiian group. Man-slaying was common, however, and the bone-breaking art of lua was genuinely used by highwaymen at narrow places on the trails.

Related Entries

Kupua, Kamapuaʻa, Menehune, Nightmarchers, Kū, Lono, Kāne, Kanaloa, Moʻo, Pele, Nawao, Māui, Taniwha