TE AKE’S REVENGE #4

len.george (63)in #history • 5 years ago

The dawn of another soft summer day spread over the Maori world, and the gentle swell of the Tai-Rawhiti [East] came mildly pulsing in from the vast smooth expanse of the sea, meeting the crescent of white sands in a long murmurous ear-soothing snore and pause and snore and roll again.

No wind yet stirred the just-waking face of the deep, a morning when the smallest kopapa [canoe] could have been launched where at other times the great rollers came thundering in upon the shore in a smashing cannonade.

The kaka parrot

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screeched his “Get up” cry in the dark thickets that filled the valley almost to the beach, and presently the bellbird

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and the flute-tongued tui

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set the shores and hills ringing with their sweet tinkle and gurgle and bing-bong of bush song.

Soon the fisher-folks’ camp began to show signs of life.

A woman, with a rough cloak of flax about her shoulders, came sleepily out of one of the saplings and fern-frond shelters that leaned against the black Cave Rock.

Throwing off her garment she stretched her arms and yawned, and stood there awhile listening to the bird-song of the morning, a strong, firm, tall figure, in all the rounded vigour of young womanhood, a Juno statue limned darkly against the yellowing dawn.

She walked a few steps along the sands, stooping to pick up pieces of dry driftwood, and turning to the shallow holes where the cooking fires were daily kindled, she set to at the task of lighting the haangi [earth oven] for the morning meal.

But the meal was not enjoyed leisurely by the lords of the fishing camp.

Scarcely had the people seated themselves about the mats on which their food baskets were laid, when a youth who had walked to the sea-edge scanning the tideway for signs of fish shoals and the morning sky for weather omens, suddenly clapped eyes on a sight that set him quivering with astonishment.

A flock of seagulls hovered over a long, black mass which lay like a half-tide rock just in the wash of the little surf on the point of the sandspit which ran out on the opposite side of the estuary.

A moment later and a yell like a war-cry rang out over the sands and brought the kainga [tribe/group] to its feet,

[as a whaleship’s crew scuttles up at the look-out man’s cry of “Blo-ow, there she blows!”]

“He ika moana! He ika moana! He tohora nui, kua pae ki te oné!” the youth called out

[A fish of the ocean, the cry went, a great fish of the ocean, a great whale, stranded on the shore!]

Down to the water’s edge, the whole camp came dashing, and with wild cries of astonishment and delight, they verified with their own eyes what the young sea-watcher had discovered.

“Launch the canoes,” cried Turaki-po.

Several of the long dug-out fishing craft were shoved into the water, and into them tumbled the naked brown men.

The paddlers sent their canoes swiftly shooting across the outflowing tide of the estuary and out they dashed on the opposite sandbank, and in a few moments were clambering over the stranded monster.

It was a dead paraoa,[a sperm whale, ]

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a rich haul indeed, for its flesh was the sweetest meat to the Maori, and from certain of its bones, he could fashion his long, curved broadsword-like weapon, the hoeroa.

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The receding tide left the whale lying almost dry and clear of the water, and the fisher tribe made the most of their time before next high tide.

Turaki-po ordered all the camp dwellers to set to work to strip the flesh off it, and men and women laboured with fierce delight, cutting into the blubber with obsidian knife-flakes and sharp shells and tearing off strip after strip of the whale meat.

Fires were kindled close by on the sands and the toilers took brief spells to feast on half-cooked slices of the blubbery flesh and set to again with renewed, savage energy.

It was the feast day of a lifetime.

So there on the hot and shining sands, the naked tattooed toilers sweated at their oily work, and canoes went to and fro across the river mouth loaded with whale meat for the camp.

But Turaki-po sat by himself on the beach, silently watching the workers.

His behaviour was strangely listless for such a man of fierce action.

Turaki-po, in truth, was secretly suspicious and frightened.

He had had a curious dream, a moemoea, which he read as a warning, the previous night, and now his nerves were tingling and twitching.

His own special and personal god was at work.

The coming of this great fish was of a surety a work supernatural, but the strange fears that crept over him gradually overmastered his cravings.

However good this treasure from the deep it was not for him.

So, possessed by a conviction that his own atua [god] did not wish him to join in the whale-meat feast on the beach, he resolved to remove himself for a while from the danger area.

It may be that he was possessed of a more sensitive nose than his fellows.

Certain it is that he denied himself a share in the blubbery banquet.

He quietly paddled himself across the estuary in the smallest of the canoes and saying not a word to any of his people he set off homeward by the foot trail which skirted the foot of the hills.

There he betook him to his spells for the averting of witchcraft and the machinations of his enemies.

On the sands at the Opaawaho mouth, his tribespeople feasted long that evening, by the light of the great blazing fires of driftwood around the foot of the old Cave Rock.

Next morning’s sun rose on a strangely silent camp.

No early risers sang their snatches of song in mimicry of the gurgling and whistling tui, no smoke of oven fires coiled up in thin blue columns as the first flush of sunshine set the cave-riddled lava palisade of Red cliffs aglow with a rosy adumbration of the long-dead volcanic fires.

The fishing canoes lay hauled up on the hard sands.

The seagulls were astir, seeking their morning’s food, and a flock of sharp-beaked scavengers squabbled over the hacked carcass of the ika moana [seafood] that evilly scented the good salt air.

Motionless, soundless figures lay scattered about the campfires, some out on the open sands, some in the mouth of the great black Cave Rock.

They lay in contorted attitudes, their legs were drawn up, their faces twisted and pain disfigured, their hands clenched and dug into the sand.

It was a camp of the dead.

The sun rose higher, and curious seagulls came reconnoitring the silent bivouac, their shrill screams rang with echoes upon echoes through the hollow rock.

At last one of the prone figures, a woman, stirred, rose with slow and staggering movements, as if waking from a long trance.

She stood awhile looking dazed on the sleepers around her.

She called them, but no answer came.

She shook one, and then another, but they were stiff and cold, and she uttered a yell of terror.

Death had smitten her companions while she slept the heavy sleep of the surfeited.

The savage woman, aghast with horror, rushed from the rock of death and raced along the beach towards the narrows where the great rock of Rapanui stood in craggy sentry-go over the tideway.

Clambering around the point where the overhanging cliffs leaned above the trail, she ran along the muddy shores of Ohikaparuparu until she came upon a little camp of fisher-people from over the hills.

To them, she told the terrible tale, and then she passes out of our story again.

Her name has been preserved in the oral tradition; she was Hineroto, and she was a daughter of the warrior chief Wheke, the son of the conqueror Te Rangiwhakaputa.

She was close of kin to Te Aké, and that was how says the Maori, she happened to be the only one spared when the angel of death smote the campers on the sand.

“Ha! Kua ea te maté!” was Te Aké’s exclamation, when the news reached him at Akaroa.

His words meant that his daughter’s death had been paid for, that vengeance had been wrought.

That Turaki-po had escaped the fate of the rest was a pity, but to the Maori mind, it was perfectly just and correct that his tribe should suffer for his misdoings.

In Te Aké’s heart, there was no possible doubt that it was his powerful karakia that had brought the death-dealing whale ashore at the camp of his enemy’s tribe.

And Turaki-po, he, too, divined the hand of the gods in that tipi or death-stroke from the ocean.

The great fish, it was clear, was saturated with a most terrible tapu, soaked through and through with tapu as whale oil soaks a mat, and it was clear also that this tapu it was that had slain the sleeping feaster’s as they lay there gorged with the monster’s flesh, and twisted them up in strange and terrifying contortions, suffering, as was the penalty of kinship, vicarious retribution for the murder wrought by their chief.

And from that day onward Tuawera Rock was shunned by the Maori fishers, for it was tapu to the witchcraft-smitten folk of Poho-areare, and never again did the summer-time flounder-spearers and the mussel hunters spread their sleeping-mats in its shadow.

It was a place of ghosts, of dead men’s spirits, that whistled in the night.

The name by which the rock became known has carried down to our own times the memory of that midnight death-stroke from the gods.

Info From

The first of the below posts has a list of the previous posts of Maori Myths and Legends

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/how-war-was-declared-between-tainui-and-arawa

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-curse-of-manaia-part-1

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-curse-of-manaia-part-2

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-hatupatu-and-his-brothers

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/hatupatu-and-his-brothers-part-2

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-the-emigration-of-turi-an-ancestor-of-wanganui

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-continuing-legend-of-turi

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/turi-seeks-patea