A Tūtūnui

Tinirau lived at Motutapu, and around him gathered every kind of creature the sea holds — fish of every sort, and among them one animal he loved above the rest: Tūtūnui, a whale he had raised and kept as something closer to a companion than livestock. This is the part worth sitting with before anything goes wrong in the story: Tinirau's whole domain is care. He is not described as a warrior or a trickster or a wielder of great power over the elements. He is a keeper — someone the sea creatures answer to because he looks after them, and Tūtūnui was the clearest expression of that care, a whale that trusted him enough to be ridden and to come when called.

A tohunga (expert / priest) named Kae came to Motutapu — in most tellings to perform a ceremony, in some versions connected to the birth of Tinirau's child — and when it came time for Kae to go home, Tinirau offered him the one thing he had that could make the journey easy and swift: Tūtūnui, to carry him back across the water.

This was not a small offer. Lending your pet whale to a visitor is an act of real generosity and real trust, both in the visitor and in the animal's own willingness to be lent out this way. Tinirau gave clear instruction, in the tellings that specify it: Kae was to ride Tūtūnui close to shore, get off in the shallows, and send the whale back out to deeper water once he was safely home, so that Tūtūnui would not be stranded or harmed.

Kae did not do that. Whether out of simple greed, or the temptation of having a whale of that size at his disposal with nobody watching, or some grievance the tellings differ on, Kae rode Tūtūnui in far too close, deliberately grounded him, and killed him. He and his people then cooked and ate the whale — Tinirau's companion, given in trust for a safe journey home, turned into a feast for a man who owed his safe journey to that very trust.

Word of what had happened reached Tinirau, and it is worth noticing exactly what kind of story this becomes at that point, because it does not turn into a tale about a grieving man losing his mind with rage. It becomes a story about care that has been abused, and about what a community owes the person whose trust was broken.

Tinirau did not go himself. He sent for it to be answered properly, in a way suited to what had actually happened — not simple violence in return, but a careful, patient search for the one identifying detail that would let his people know they had found the right man among strangers, because Kae had fled far from Motutapu and hidden himself among people who did not know what he had done.

That detail was Kae's teeth — famously crooked, broken or gapped in a way nobody else around him shared. Tinirau's women, sent out to find him, needed a way to be certain, among a whole community of unfamiliar faces, which man was Kae, without simply asking and risking that he would run again or that his hosts would protect him. So they carried the one thing that would make him show his teeth without him realising why: they performed haka (ceremonial dance), and songs, and clowning designed purely to make everyone in the room laugh, watching each face as it broke into a grin, until they found the mouth with the tell.

That is where this half of the story leaves us — a wrong identified precisely, patiently, by people who understood exactly what they were looking for and were not going to be satisfied by a guess. The taking of Tūtūnui was fast and careless. The finding of the man responsible was slow and exact. That contrast is the whole shape of Tinirau's teaching, and it does not resolve until his women actually catch Kae laughing, which the next telling picks up.