Patupaiarehe

Mist gathers along the ridge of Pirongia before the light goes, and it does not always behave the way mist should. It thickens into straight edges. It settles into the shapes of palisades and gable ends where there is no pā, and out of it comes the thin breathy note of a flute, three or four falling steps, repeated. The people below the bush line knew what that sound was. They banked the cooking fire higher and stayed inside the reach of its smoke.

The patupaiarehe held the high country. Not the villages, not the cleared river flats, but the mountain tops that keep their cloud all day and the parts of the forest where the canopy closes over and the ground stays cold. In Hauraki tradition their peaks were named one after another, Moehau, Motutere, Maumaupaki, Whakairi, Kaitarakihi, Te Koronga, Horehore, Whakaperu and the two Te Aroha, and Pirongia away in the Waikato. Rotorua had them in its hills, the Urewera ranges had them, the Waitākere had them. In the South Island they were placed in the hills above Lyttelton Harbour and Akaroa, in the Tākitimu range, and in the broken country between the Arahura River and Lake Brunner. Their houses were sometimes said to be built of supplejack vine, twisted and springy and dark. Sometimes they were said to be built of the mist itself.

They were not classed as people. The phrase used of them is he iwi atua, a people of the supernatural order, and everything about their appearance said so. Their skin was white, or albino, or the colour of red ochre, depending on who was describing them. Their hair was gold or a dull reddish shade, the colour called urukehu that still appears now and then in Māori families. Their eyes ran from pale blue to black. No moko marked any of them, and to a tattooed people that blankness of face was itself unsettling. On height the accounts refuse to agree. Tūhoe held them small. Others put them at ordinary human size. In Whanganui they were giants over two metres tall, which suggests the mountain shaped the story as much as the story shaped the mountain.

Their living was gathered rather than grown. They ate the forest raw, fished the lake shores and the sea edge, and went out in canoes made from flax stalks, light enough to lift and useless the moment the wind got up. Certain things belonged to them and could not be taken: the white eels, the albino birds, the red flax, the red eel. People who helped themselves to any of these found out why that was a rule. They wore flax cloaks dyed red, called pākērangi, and rough mats over them, and they carried the kōauau and the pūtōrino, the small flutes whose sound crosses a valley better than a shout does.

On a still night at the water’s edge a party of them would be working a long flax net between them, thigh deep, talking and laughing without any care about being heard, the fish coming up in a silver weight against the mesh. This is how the chief Kahukura found them. He had been caught out by dark on a lonely beach and woke to the sound of voices. He was short and fair, and in the dark, among that crowd, nobody looked at him twice. He worked alongside them threading the gutted fish onto flax lines, and he tied every knot so that it would slip. The lines kept coming undone. The fish kept spilling. The work dragged on far longer than it should have, and then the sky went grey behind the hills and the whole party dropped everything and ran. Kahukura was left standing on the sand with their net, and he took it apart stitch by stitch until he understood it, and that is how the knowledge of net-making came to his people.

What they wanted from the human world, chiefly, was women. A chief would stand off in the trees and play, and the music worked on the listener the way a current works on a swimmer, and she would walk out to him without deciding to. Whanawhana took Tāwhaitu, the wife of Ruarangi, while she was lifting kūmara on the bank of the Waipā, and carried her up to Hihikiwi. He returned her at first light. That was the cruelty of it: she came home, and then the flute would sound again on some later night and she would have to go back. Men who blundered into their country were roughed up and turned loose, or not turned loose at all.

The remedy was smell. A tohunga had the timbers and the threshold of Ruarangi’s hut coated thick with kōkōwai, red ochre worked into shark oil, and told Tāwhaitu to set an earth oven going in front of the door so the steam of cooked food would roll across it all night. Whanawhana came. He got as far as the ochre and the steam and could go no further, and after a while he understood that there was nothing more he could do, and he went away and was not seen again. The people of that stretch of the Waipā carry the copper hair still.

That is the whole shape of their power and the whole shape of its limit. They could raise weather, hide a hillside, put a compulsion into a note of music, and hand over knowledge that no human had, the mākutu and the love charms and the string games that Miru taught his mortal father-in-law after marrying into a human family. Against them the counter-measures were embarrassingly ordinary: ochre and fish oil on the doorframe, an oven full of steaming food, and a fire kept alive till dawn. Cooked food disgusted them. Firelight frightened them. Sunrise ended any argument, which is why the mountain Mauao is still standing at the harbour mouth in Tauranga, half dragged to the sea by patupaiarehe friends who were caught by the dawn and had to let go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are patupaiarehe?

Patupaiarehe are fairy-like supernatural beings of Māori tradition who live on mist-covered mountain tops and deep in the forests of New Zealand. They are also called tūrehu and pakepakehā. Māori tradition classes them as he iwi atua, a supernatural people rather than human beings, despite their human-like society and appearance.

What do patupaiarehe look like?

Patupaiarehe have pale or white skin, red or golden hair, and eyes ranging from light blue to black, and they are never tattooed. Accounts disagree on their size: Tūhoe tradition describes them as small, other traditions as roughly human-sized, and Whanganui stories as giants over two metres tall. They wear red-dyed flax garments called pākērangi.

How do you keep patupaiarehe away?

Smell and light drive patupaiarehe off. Homes were smeared with kōkōwai, red ochre mixed with shark oil, and cooking ovens were fired up so the steam of cooked food would surround the house, both of which the patupaiarehe found repugnant. They also feared firelight and sunlight, so a campfire kept glowing through the night was considered protection.

What did patupaiarehe do to humans?

Patupaiarehe lured women away using hypnotic music played on flutes, taking them to their camps before returning them, with a spell that let the abductor call the woman back whenever he chose. Men who entered their territory were mistreated and released, or killed. The patupaiarehe chief Whanawhana took Tāwhaitu, the wife of Ruarangi, from the banks of the Waipā in this way.

What did Māori learn from the patupaiarehe?

Māori tradition credits the patupaiarehe with several important skills. The chief Kahukura learned the secret of making fishing nets by infiltrating a patupaiarehe fishing party at night and delaying them until dawn forced them to abandon their net. A patupaiarehe named Miru, married to a mortal woman, taught his father-in-law the rites of mākutu and ātahu along with whai string games and tititorea stick games.

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