This beautiful mountain, with its dense woody ridges and valleys, its cascading brooks and its rocky fastnesses, is in Maori eyes the abode of hosts of Patu-paiarehe. In the dark moonless nights the lone eel-fisher out on the Waipa banks would start in affright when on his imaginative ear broke the sound of the fairies singing in their pas, and he would promptly fortify himself against their magic wiles by reciting potent karakia or incantations, and would chant a high quavering waiata to scare away the goblins of the night.

One day long ago Te Puhi and I were out pigeon-shooting far up the wooded slopes of Mt Pirongia. Evening had come upon us while we were intent upon bagging the “wing-flapping children of Tane”, and, as we had a long and toilsome journey down the bush ridges and across rapid creeks to make before we reached the old frontier township of Alexandra, my Maori companion and I decided upon spending the night in the forest. So, selecting a comfortable nook beneath the spreading branches of a fine old rata tree, we were soon enjoying a savoury meal of fat pigeons roasted over the camping fire, with the turnip-like pith of the nikau palm in lieu of bread. Tama-nui-te-Ra sank down beyond the westernmost peak into his ocean cave. The evening mists crept up from the murmuring streams and the gloomy gullies, and stole noiselessly along the dark forest ranges; and the Hau-ma-ringiringi, the soft fog-born dews, descended on the earth. And there was something uncanny in the long dancing gleams of light which shot through the forest from our bivouac fire. The black shadows of the woodland swayed like ghosts with the flickering of the flames; and, Puhi, squatting close by the fire, gazed half fearfully down the gloomy forest aisles. And presently, in subdued tones, as if he were chary of arousing the genii of the bush by too loud a tongue, he told the story of the fairies.

“O friend of mine, listen! This is the belief of our people. This peak of Pirongia is an enchanted mountain; and it is well that you, a pakeha, are with me, else would I perchance be visited by the fairy tribe who dwell upon these heights. Pirongia is a Maunga-hikonga-uira, that is a ‘lightning-flashing peak’. Sometimes, when it is fine weather below on the plains, thunder will be heard rolling along the summit, and the lightning will be seen darting downwards upon its topmost peak. That is a tohu maté, an omen of death or misfortune to the Maoris: some chief of our tribe will die, or some untoward event will overtake the people. And high up around the top of the mountain live the Patu-paiarehe.

A great many years ago, many generations before the pakeha came to these shores and when the plains below us here were covered with the fires of the Maoris, there lived at the foot of this mountain, near the Waipa River, a chief named Ruarangi of the tribe to which I too belong. His wife was named Tawhaiatu, and she was a woman of fine appearance, a beautiful woman in the eyes of the Maori. And the fairies of the mountain also considered her a fine wahine, for one morning when Ruarangi returned to his house in the early dawn, after having been out all night eel-fishing, he found that his wife had disappeared. He searched long for her, and called her name aloud, but to no avail. When full daylight came, Ruarangi, greatly sorrowing, took his spear in his hand and placed his stone weapon in his belt and went along the track in the direction of the mountain where the fairies dwelt, for he knew that his wife had been carried off by a Patu-paiarehe. And, as he paused awhile on his way, he stretched forth his spear towards the fairy-mountain and wept, and chanted his song of lamentation for his vanished wife:

‘My message of love blows afar,

Borne on the Eastern breeze,

A token of sorrow from the

Beloved one of your dreams,

Here stand I, in whose fond arms

You oft reposed. Oh, loved one of my