Maui stealing fire

At a Glance

• Central figures: Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga, the trickster-hero and youngest of five brothers; Mahuika, the fire goddess and Maui’s ancestress, keeper of fire in her fingernails and toenails.
• Setting: Aotearoa (New Zealand), in Maori tradition; the story belongs to the pan-Polynesian Maui cycle and is preserved in oral tradition recorded by ethnographers in the nineteenth century.
• The turn: Maui extinguishes every cooking fire in the village so he can be sent to Mahuika, then tricks her into pulling out her fingernails of fire one by one until she has almost none left.
• The outcome: Mahuika, enraged, hurls her last fire at Maui and sets the world ablaze; the fire is caught and hidden in the wood of certain trees by the intervention of rain, so that humans must use fire-sticks to draw it out.
• The legacy: Fire lives inside the kaikomako, mahoe, and totara trees; when Maori make fire by friction with a wooden drill, they are drawing out what Mahuika threw into the wood on the day Maui stole from her.

Maui put out the fires. Every one. He went through the village in the dark before anyone woke, and he drowned the embers in the cooking pits with handfuls of wet earth. He poured water on the stones where coals were kept banked through the night. He smothered the last glow in the whare where his mother slept. When the people rose and found cold ash everywhere, they could not cook. They could not warm themselves. They could not see.

His mother Taranga said someone would have to go to Mahuika, the old one, the fire goddess who lived at the end of the earth, and ask her for fire again.

Maui said he would go.

The Road to Mahuika

His brothers told him not to. They knew Maui. He did not go anywhere just to ask. He went to take, to trick, to test. But Maui was already walking.

The path led downward. It led away from the sea and into country where the trees grew thick and the air was still. Maui followed it until he came to the place where Mahuika lived - a cave, or a house, or a darkness with a woman in it. She was old. She was his ancestor, though how many generations back depended on who told the story. Her fingers burned. Each fingernail held a flame, steady and bright, and each toenail held one too. Ten fingers, ten toes. Twenty fires.

She looked at Maui and knew him. She was not afraid of him. She should have been.

Who are you?

I am Maui. I am your descendant. The fires of the village have gone out. Will you give me fire?

Mahuika pulled the nail from her thumb. It came away burning. She handed it to Maui, and he took it and walked back up the path.

One Nail at a Time

He did not carry it home. Halfway up the road, he threw it into a stream. The fire went out with a hiss. He turned around and walked back to Mahuika.

The fire went out. I dropped it. Will you give me another?

She pulled the nail from her forefinger. She gave it to him. He walked away. He threw it into a puddle. He came back.

It went out again.

She pulled the nail from her middle finger. He came back. She pulled the nail from her ring finger. He came back. She pulled the nail from her smallest finger. Five fingernails gone. Maui kept returning, and each time Mahuika gave him the next nail and each time he put it out. He was counting. She was not - not yet.

The toes went next. One foot, then the other. Mahuika’s fires were going out and not coming back. She had started with twenty. She was down to the last nail on the last toe of her left foot when she understood what he was doing.

The Last Nail

Mahuika did not hand it to him. She tore the nail from her own toe and threw it - not at Maui but at the ground, at the trees, at the world. Fire exploded outward. The forest caught. The scrub caught. The ferns curled black and the sap in the tree trunks boiled. Maui was standing in the middle of it.

He ran. Fire chased him. He called on the rain. He called on the sleet, on the hail, on every form of water that falls from the sky. Some versions say he changed himself into a hawk - the karearea - and flew above the flames. Some say he simply ran faster than fire, which no ordinary man could do, but Maui was not ordinary.

The rain came. It came hard and cold and it beat the fire back. Water poured down the slopes and drowned the burning scrub. Steam rose so thick it blocked the sun. The fire shrank, and shrank, and Mahuika was left standing in the middle of a ruined, soaking landscape with no nails left and her fire almost dead.

Almost. Not entirely.

Fire in the Wood

Before the rain killed the last of it, Mahuika’s fire found refuge. It crept into the heartwood of certain trees. The kaikomako took it. The mahoe took it. The totara took it. The fire hid there, deep inside the grain, where water could not reach.

Mahuika knew this. She had thrown the fire wide enough and hot enough that something would catch it and keep it. She was angry, but she was not stupid. Maui had tricked her out of nineteen nails, but the twentieth was in the trees, and it would stay there.

Maui went home. He told his mother and his brothers what had happened - some of it, the parts that made him look clever. He did not dwell on the part where the world burned and he ran screaming for rain.

But the knowledge he brought back was real. He showed them how to take a pointed stick of kaikomako and press it into a flat piece of the same wood and spin it between the palms. The friction called out what Mahuika had put in. Smoke rose first, then a spark, then a glow in the wood-dust. Fire. Not Mahuika’s fingernail any longer, but fire from her line, fire that remembered where it came from.

What Remained

The village had fire again. Not as a gift kept burning in a pit, dependent on someone watching it through the night, but as a thing stored in every forest. Any tree of the right kind held it. A man with a fire-stick and strong hands could call it out whenever he needed it.

Mahuika stayed where she was, at the end of the downward road, with no nails. Whether she regrew them, whether she sat in the dark and waited, the stories do not say much about. She had done what a fire goddess does - she had given fire to the world, even if the giving was a theft and the gift was thrown in rage.

Maui walked home through the wet forest, through the steam and the smell of charred wood. The kaikomako trees were already putting out new shoots.