Te ahi o te whenua

Stand at Whakaari, or on the crater floor at Tongariro, or in the steam at Whakarewarewa, and you are standing on top of Rūaumoko's fire. But there is a second story about how that fire got here, and it belongs to Ngātoro-i-rangi.

Ngātoro-i-rangi came on Te Arawa. He was a tohunga (expert / priest) of enormous power, and he set about claiming the interior of Te Ika-a-Māui — walking inland, naming the country, laying down the boundaries of what would become Te Arawa's rohe (region).

He climbed Tongariro. And near the top, in the snow, he began to die of the cold.

So he called to his sisters — Kuiwai and Haungaroa, back in Hawaiki — and asked them to send him fire. They sent it, and the fire came underground and under the sea, travelling the whole way, breaking the surface as it came: at Whakaari, at Moutohorā, at Rotorua, at Taupō, at Tokaanu — the whole geothermal line up the middle of the island, which is the track the fire took. It came up under him on the mountain and he lived.

That is why the volcanic country runs where it runs, and why the hot pools are where they are. It is a story about a man who nearly died and was saved by his sisters, and the shape of the fire is the shape of that rescue.

The two accounts sit together comfortably. Rūaumoko is the heat itself, in his mother's body. Ngātoro-i-rangi's fire is that heat brought to the surface along a particular path for a particular reason. Māori tradition rarely insists on one version cancelling another.

What the fire gave people was extraordinary. Whole communities lived on geothermal ground for centuries: cooking in boiling pools, steaming food in the ground, bathing in warm water in the middle of a Rotorua winter, using the heat for rongoā (traditional medicine) and for washing and for keeping babies warm. There is a way of cooking a meal in a hot pool that requires you to know exactly which pool, exactly how long, and exactly which ones will kill you. That knowledge is local, precise, and it is still held.

And the mountains themselves are tūpuna. Tongariro, Ngāuruhoe, Ruapehu are not features; they are ancestors with names and histories and relationships — Taranaki is over there in the west because of a fight over Pīhanga, and the Whanganui river is the path he took when he left. When Te Heuheu Tūkino IV gifted the peaks in 1887 to protect them, he was not donating real estate. He was placing relatives under a protection he hoped would hold.

That is also why Tūpuna (ancestors) Maunga and awa (river) now hold legal personhood in this country — Te Urewera, Whanganui, Taranaki. Not a legal novelty for its own sake. The law finally catching up with a whakapapa that has never changed.

So what do you do with Rūaumoko's fire?

If you go into geothermal country, treat it as somebody's house. Stay on the track — not only because the ground is thin, but because the tapu is real and there are places that are not for casual walking. Do not throw anything into a pool. Do not name-call the mountain.

And if you get into a hot pool this winter, take one breath before you get in and remember what you are sitting in: the warmth of the youngest child, coming up through his mother's skin, for you.