When Kurangaituku returned to find her birds slaughtered and Hatupatu gone, the tellings do not describe simple anger. They describe something closer to grief that had nowhere else to go except forward, in pursuit, because staying still with what had just happened to her was not something she could do. She set out after him, and the distance she is said to have covered is enormous — the length of the country, by some accounts, driven on by a loss that had taken the one thing she had built for herself and left nothing behind but the sound of her own calling after him through the bush.
It is worth being precise about what was actually fuelling that chase, because the tellings that only frighten children skip straight past it. This was not a monster hunting a man for sport, and it was not simple territorial fury at losing a captive. She had raised those birds from nothing, individually, over what sounds like years of patient, unglamorous care, and in a single afternoon they were gone, killed by the one person she had trusted enough to leave in charge of them. Grief that looks like rage is still grief. Running someone down across the length of the land is, in its own terrible way, still an act of love turned inside out and given nowhere useful to go.
Hatupatu, for his part, used every advantage his own cleverness could find. In the best-known telling, he came upon a great rock and called on it to open and shelter him, and it did — Te Ana-o-Hatupatu, the cave that still bears his name, is pointed to today as the place the rock took him in and hid him from her while she passed close by, searching and calling, unable to find the very ground that was sheltering him. Different tellings of Te Arawa history place this moment and its landmarks slightly differently, and the exact route of the chase is remembered differently from place to place, but the shape of it stays the same across the versions: a desperate man, aided at the crucial moment by the whenua itself, staying just out of reach of a pursuer who would not stop.
That detail matters, because it puts the land itself on his side at the critical moment, and it is worth asking why, if you are inclined to read this story slowly rather than just as chase and thrill. Perhaps it is simply that he was of that land and she, for all her mastery of the deep forest, was something else, something not quite of the whenua in the way he was. Perhaps the rock sheltering him is the story quietly telling you, ahead of the ending, which side the land itself was going to come down on when it finally mattered.
She kept going anyway, past the cave, past whatever other near misses different tellings remember, driven by something that clearly was not going to be satisfied by giving up partway. There is no scene here of her stopping to reconsider, no moment where the grief burns itself out and she turns back toward her ruined forest to grieve properly instead. She kept moving forward, toward Rotorua, toward the last part of this story, because the loss she was carrying had become the only thing organising her.
If there is something to take from the chase itself, separate from how it ends, it might be this — a loss big enough, and personal enough, can carry a person a very long way past the point where turning back would have been the wiser, gentler thing to do. Kurangaituku had every reason to grieve. What the story asks you to notice is how far grief, unmet and unspoken to anyone who might have understood it, is capable of carrying someone before it finally runs out of road.