The chase ended at Whakarewarewa, in the geothermal country outside what is now Rotorua, ground that still hisses and steams and boils today for anyone who goes to look at it. Kurangaituku, still following Hatupatu, is said to have run on across that ground without the caution someone born to it, or warned about it, would have known to take. In the best-known telling she fell, or was tricked into stepping onto thin crust over boiling mud, and was killed there — undone, at the very end, by the land itself, the same wild country she had known and moved through more easily than any human ever could.
There is something almost unbearable in that detail if you sit with it properly. She had spent her whole life mastering the deep, difficult, untouched parts of the whenua that everyone else found frightening or impassable. She could move through dense bush the way birds moved through it. And it was not the forest that killed her, and it was not Hatupatu directly, either. It was a stretch of ground utterly unlike her own territory, foreign geothermal country she did not know the way she knew her forest, that finally caught her out. The one place in the whole country she was not the master of turned out to be the place she died.
Different tellings from different parts of Te Arawa country place the exact spot and the exact mechanism a little differently — some emphasise a trick played on her at the crossing, others simply the treacherous ground itself doing what treacherous ground does to someone unfamiliar with it. What stays constant is the shape of the ending: a pursuit that had run the length of the country came apart, finally, not through triumph on Hatupatu's part but through an accident of unfamiliar terrain, and Kurangaituku did not survive it.
Now hold both halves of this story together, because that is what the telling actually asks of you. In one half, she is the frightening figure with claw-like fingers who snatched a man from the bush and hunted him half the length of the land. In the other half, she is a woman who built an entire household of love out of birds and lizards because that was where she found it, who trusted the one human she let close with the thing she cared about most, and who was betrayed by exactly that trust before she ever did a single frightening thing to anyone. Both of those are the same story. Neither one is the full picture on its own.
This is worth carrying further than just this one pūrākau. So many of the figures remembered as monsters in these tellings — feared, warned about, kept for scaring children into staying close to the village — turn out, told slower and from their own side, to be figures who loved something fiercely and lost it, or who were driven to what they became by grief or betrayal that nobody bothered to ask about before deciding what to call them. Kurangaituku is one of the clearest examples of that pattern in the whole body of pūrākau, precisely because her tenderness is preserved right alongside her ferocity, in the same tellings, by the very people who also fear her.
So when you hear a story about someone painted only as dangerous, only as strange, only as something to be avoided, it is worth asking, the way this pūrākau quietly asks, what that person actually loved, and what was done to it before they became the thing everyone learned to be afraid of. The claws were real. So was the birdsong she woke to every morning of her life, and so was the grief of losing it. The kindest way to carry her story forward is to remember both.