Kuna Loa heard the crash of the axe on the rock, and he knew that Ma-ui had come. He dashed up the stream to hide himself again in the deep pools. Ma-ui showed his mother that she was safe, and then he went following the Long Eel.
Kuna Loa had gone into a deep pool. Ma-ui flung burning stones into the water of that pool, [[36]]making it boil up. Then Kuna Loa dashed into another pool. From pool to pool Ma-ui chased him, making the pools boil around him. (And there they boil to this day, although Kuna Loa is no longer there.) At last the Eel found a cave in the bottom of one of the pools, and he went and hid in it, and Ma-ui could not find him there, nor could the hot stones that Ma-ui threw into the water, making it boil, drive Kuna Loa out.
Hina thought she was safe from the Long Eel after that. She thought that his skin was so scalded by the boiling water that he had died in his cave. Down the river bank for water she would go, and sometimes she would stand on the bank all wreathed in flowers.
But one day, as she was standing on the bank of the river, Kuna Loa suddenly came up. Hina fled before him. The Eel was between her and her cave, and she could not get back to her shelter. She fled through the woods. And as she fled she shrieked out chants to Ma-ui: her chants went through the woods, and along the side of the mountain, and across the sea; they came at last up the side of Ha-le-a-ka-la, where her son Ma-ui was.
There were many people in the places that Hina fled through, but they could do nothing to help her against the Long Eel. He came swiftly after her. The people in the villages that they went through [[37]]stood and watched the woman and the Eel that pursued her.
Where would she go now? The Long Eel was close behind her. Then Hina saw a bread-fruit tree with great branches, and she climbed into it. Kuna Loa wound himself around the tree and came after her. But the branch that Hina was in was lifted up and up by the tree, and the Long Eel could not come to her.
And then Ma-ui came. He had dashed down the side of the mountain and had crossed the channel with two strokes of his paddles and had hurried along the track made by the Long Eel. Now he saw his mother in the branch that kept mounting up, and he saw Kuna Loa winding himself up after her. Ma-ui went into the tree. He struck the Eel a terrible blow and brought him to the ground. Then he sprang down and cut his head off. With other blows of his axe he cut the Eel all to pieces. He flung the head and the tail of Kuna Loa into the sea. The head turned into fish of many kinds, and the tail became the large conger eel of the sea. Other parts of the body turned into sea monsters of different kinds. And the blood of Kuna Loa, as it fell into the fresh water, became the common eels. The fresh and the salt water eels came into the world in this way, and Ma-ui, by killing the Long Eel, wrought the sixth of his great deeds. [[38]]
The Search that Ma-ui’s Brother made for his Sister Hina-of-the-Sea.
Ma-ui had four brothers, and each of them was named Ma-ui. The doer of the great deeds was known as “the skillful Ma-ui,” and the other four brothers were called “the forgetful Ma-uis.”