Nuku-mai-tore

Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Maori Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A tree-dwelling people who never grew old, who ate their food raw and cut their children out of their mothers until a human castaway taught them otherwise.
Role in Mythos: They are the strange hosts of the voyager Tura, and the tradition through which Māori accounts explain the coming of fire, cooking, ordinary childbirth and the knowledge of ageing.
Relation to Humans: Tura lived among them, married one of their women and gave them the three things they lacked, and they in turn gave him nothing he could keep. Their descendants belong to the older, stranger population of the bush rather than to any human line.

Tura came ashore at Otea with his fire-sticks still in his hand, and the first people he met were dancing on the sand. Te-kai-runga and Te-kai-uma, the tellings call them, and they moved oddly, waving their hands close against their bodies as though their arms were too short to swing. They were the children of the Nuku-mai-tore. They had never seen a man like him and he had never seen anything like them.

The record cannot agree on what they looked like, and the disagreement is more interesting than a tidy answer would be. One account gives them a great chest and a heavy waist beneath a small head. Another says there was no head at all, only chest and waist. A third says the arms and legs were so stunted that the creatures appeared to have no limbs, only hands that fluttered near the ribs. What the versions share is a body that will not resolve into a human shape, as though whoever first described them was working from a glimpse through leaves rather than a long look.

Leaves would be right. The Nuku-mai-tore lived in the trees, roosting on the wharawhara and the kiekie, the perching plants that pack the forks of tall forest trees into wet green cushions. It is a life spent above the ground in cold air that smells of moss and crushed leaf, in a layer of the forest where a person cannot easily follow. Māori tradition keeps a whole population of earlier inhabitants like this, the patupaiarehe and the tūrehu among them, and the Nuku-mai-tore sit at the strangest end of that company.

Tura reached them by accident. He had gone out in Whiro’s canoe, and when the sea opened into a whirlpool he caught the boughs of an overhanging tree and let the canoe and its crew go on without him. What he found on the far side of that grab was a country running on rules he did not recognise.

They ate their kūmara raw. They ate whale raw. Tura set his fire-sticks going on the beach, and the first smoke that lifted off the driftwood sent the whole company bolting for the trees, because nothing in their lives had prepared them for it. They came back. He showed them the fire, and then the far greater trick of what fire does to food, and they learned both.

The next thing he taught them cost more to learn. He married a woman of their people named Turaki-hau, and when her time came her relatives arrived at the house carrying gifts of matā, worked obsidian, and began to weep. Tura asked what the weeping was for. She told him the child would be cut out of her with the flakes and that she would die of it, because that was how her people were born. Every mother among them died.

He drove the midwives out. He built her a house to give birth in and set two posts inside it, the pou-tama-wahine for her to grip and the pou-tama-tāne for her to brace against, and the child came into the world the ordinary way, and the mother lived. Tura cut the cord, offered the whenua to the atua Mua, and named the boy Tauira-ahua, and the tohi rite was performed over him. In the space of one night the Nuku-mai-tore acquired a form of childbirth that did not kill.

There was one gift left in him, and he had not meant to give it. His wife was combing out his hair when she found a white strand among the dark and asked what it was. Her people did not age. Nothing in that country turned grey or slackened or stopped. Tura told her what the hair was, and what came walking behind it, and the tradition preserves the answer as a proverb still in use: ka tata ki a koe ngā taru o Tura, ko te hina, ko te mate. The weeds of Tura are close upon you, the grey hair, and then death. He left them not long after.

Their powers, such as they are, come to almost nothing that could be used as a weapon. They do not shapeshift, curse, drown swimmers or steal children. What they have is endurance without decay and a foothold in a part of the forest no one else occupies, high in the canopy where the perching plants hold enough soil and rain to live on. That is a real advantage and it is also the whole of it.

Against that stands a list of things they could not do. They had no fire and no cooked food, and a handful of smoke was enough to scatter them into the bush. Their births killed their mothers as a matter of course, generation after generation, until an outsider pointed out that it need not. They could not keep the one human who came to them, because the thing his body was doing had no place in their country and no cure in it either. A people who cannot age turn out to be a people who cannot learn anything from ageing, and the story leaves them exactly where it found them, up in the wharawhara, watching the smoke.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Nuku-mai-tore?

The Nuku-mai-tore are forest-dwelling beings of Māori tradition who lived in trees, roosting among the wharawhara and kiekie plants that grow in the forks of tall forest trees. They belong to the older, non-human population of the bush, alongside the patupaiarehe and the tūrehu. They are best known from the story of the voyager Tura, who lived among them.

What do the Nuku-mai-tore look like?

The sources disagree. One account describes a large chest and waist beneath a small head, another gives no head at all, and a third says the arms and legs were so short that the beings seemed to have no limbs, only hands waving close against the body. All the descriptions agree that the body is badly out of human proportion.

What did Tura teach the Nuku-mai-tore?

Tura taught them three things: the use of fire, the cooking of food, and childbirth. Before he arrived they ate kūmara and whale raw, and delivered children by cutting them from the mother with obsidian flakes, which killed her. Tura built a birth house with two posts and delivered his wife’s child the ordinary way.

Who was Turaki-hau?

Turaki-hau was the Nuku-mai-tore woman Tura married. She was the first of her people to survive giving birth, to a son named Tauira-ahua, and she was also the one who found the first white hair in Tura’s head and asked what it meant.

Why is Tura connected with grey hair and death?

The Nuku-mai-tore did not age, so when Turaki-hau found a white hair on Tura she had no idea what it was. His explanation, that grey hair is the forerunner of death, survives in the Māori proverb ka tata ki a koe ngā taru o Tura, ko te hina, ko te mate: the weeds of Tura are close upon you, the grey hair, and then death.