Kurangaituku found Hatupatu alone in the forest, and by most tellings he was in no state to resist her — exhausted, lost, or otherwise vulnerable, deep in country he did not know his way through. She caught him. And here is the detail that changes the whole texture of the story if you actually listen to it: by Hatupatu's own account, later, she caught him gently, with her lips, not with the claws everyone remembers her by. It is a small thing to notice, but it is not incidental. Even in the version told by the man who eventually escaped her, the first act is not violence. It is something closer to tenderness, or at least to care taken not to harm him.
She did not kill him, and she did not treat him as prey. She kept him — and it is worth being honest about what kept means here, because it carries both truths at once. He was not free to simply walk away, and that is real, and it matters. But he was also not caged or starved or treated as a thing. She taught him her ways, brought him into the rhythms of her household of birds, and in time left him in charge of minding her creatures while she went out to forage for food, trusting him with the very thing she loved most in the world.
Sit with that trust for a moment, because it tells you what her loneliness actually looked like from the inside. She had built an entire life of companionship with birds and lizards, and it had clearly been enough for a long time — but here was a person, a human being like the ones she had otherwise kept her distance from, and something in her wanted him close rather than simply wanted him gone. Whether that want was love in the shape we would recognise, or simply the ache of having found another creature capable of speaking back to her after so long without one, the tellings leave that open. But the shape of her actions says she was not looking for a captive to torment. She was looking, in her own way, for someone to share the forest with.
This is the part of the story that is easiest to flatten into a single word — kidnapping — and hardest to actually sit with honestly. Both things can be true. She held him against his will, and she also handed him, without hesitation, the care of everything she loved most. That is not how a story usually treats a monster. Monsters do not trust you with their children.
And here is where the story turns, because Hatupatu did not want to stay, whatever tenderness had been shown to him. He watched her leave to forage, day after day, and instead of simply waiting for a chance to talk his way free, or even to leave quietly and let her creatures be, he turned on the one thing she had trusted him with. He killed her birds — the household she had spent a lifetime building, one careful relationship at a time — and used the chaos of that killing to make his escape, fleeing back toward his own people and his own world.
Whatever you think of him for wanting his freedom, and wanting it badly enough to run, it is worth being honest that he did not simply leave. He destroyed what she loved on his way out, and there was no need for that particular cruelty if freedom alone was the goal. That choice is the hinge the rest of the story turns on, and it is the reason what follows is not simply a monster chasing an innocent man home. It is a woman who trusted someone with everything she had left, watching him burn it down as he went.