The three winds joined together, and now they made a fiercer attack upon Ma-ui’s kite. The winds tore and tossed it. Then the line broke in Ma-ui’s hands.
The winds flung the kite across the mountains. And then, to punish it for having dared to face the heavens, they rammed it down into the volcano, and stirred up the fires against it.
Then Ma-ui made for himself another kite. He flew it, and rejoiced in the flying of it, and all who saw him wondered at how high his kite went and how gracefully it bore itself in the heavens. But never again did he call upon the great winds to help him in his sport. Sometimes he would fasten his line to the black stones in the bed of the Wai-lu-ku River, and he would let the kite soar upward and range here and there. He knew by watching his soaring kite whether it would be dry and pleasant weather, and he showed his neighbors how they might know it. “Eh, neighbor,” one would say to another, “it is going to be dry weather; look how Ma-ui’s kite keeps in the sky.” They knew that they could go to the fields to work and spread out their tapa to dry, for as long as the kite soared the rain would not fall. [[15]]
Ma-ui learned what a strong pull the fierce winds had. He used to bring his kite with him when he went out on the ocean in his canoe. He would let it free; then, fastening his line to the canoe, he would let the wind that pulled the kite pull him along. By flying his kite he learned how to go more swiftly over the ocean in his canoe, and how to make further voyages than ever a man made before.
Nevertheless, his kite-flying is not counted amongst the great deeds of Ma-ui.
How Ma-ui fished up the Great Island.
Now, although Ma-ui had done deeds as great as these, he was not thought so very much of in his own house. His brothers complained that when he went fishing with them he caught no fish, or, if he drew one up, it was a fish that had been taken on a hook belonging to one of them, and that Ma-ui had managed to get tangled on to his own line. And yet Ma-ui had invented many things that his brothers made use of. At first they had spears with smooth heads on them: if they struck a bird, the bird was often able to flutter away, drawing from the spear-head that had pierced a wing. And if they struck through a fish, the fish was often able to wriggle away. Then Ma-ui put barbs upon his spear, and his spear-head held the birds and the fish. His brothers copied the spear-head that he made, and after that [[16]]they were able to kill and secure more birds and fish than ever before.
He made many things that they copied, and yet his brothers thought him a lazy and a shiftless fellow, and they made their mother think the same about him. They were the better fishermen—that was true; indeed, if there were no one but Ma-ui to go fishing, Hina-of-the-Fire, his mother, and Hina-of-the-Sea, his sister, would often go hungry.
At last Ma-ui made up his mind to do some wonderful fishing; he might not be able to catch the fine fish that his brothers desired—the u-lua and the pi-mo-e—but he would take up something from the bottom of the sea that would make his brothers forget that he was the lazy and the shiftless one.