Because Uenuku's own story is built around a single sign given and a single sign missed, it makes sense that in life he became a being people watched for signs from — specifically before travel, and specifically before battle, when the cost of getting a decision wrong was not small.
The pattern told across a number of places runs like this. If a rainbow stood ahead across the path you meant to take, arching directly over your route the way a barrier might stand across a doorway, that was read as Uenuku telling you to stop, or at least to hold. It was not treated as decoration in the sky. It was treated as a chief standing in the way, and you do not simply walk past a chief standing in a doorway without acknowledging why he is there. A war party seeing the rainbow ahead of their line of march might turn back entirely, or delay, or reconsider the whole plan, because the sign standing directly across the way you meant to go was read as a warning specific to that direction and that day.
If instead the rainbow stood behind the party, arching over the ground they had already crossed rather than the ground ahead, that was read the opposite way — as a sign that the way forward was clear, that Uenuku had already looked at what lay behind and had nothing to hold you back with. Different iwi carry slightly different detail about exactly how the sign was read and which side of a rainbow meant which thing, and it is worth being honest that this is one of those areas where the practice varied by place and by the tohunga (expert / priest) reading it. What holds constant everywhere the story is told is the basic principle — Uenuku standing in the sky was never neutral scenery. He was a message that needed reading properly before you committed to what you were about to do.
It is worth noticing what kind of authority this gives him. He does not make the decision for the war party or the traveller. He does not march out in front of them and physically block the path, and he does not appear and disappear according to what people want to hear. He simply stands where he stands, arcing across whichever part of the sky the moment calls for, and it is up to the people reading him to actually look properly and act on what they see rather than what they were hoping to see.
That is a very particular kind of mana, worth holding onto. A chief's authority, in the old pattern, was not usually about forcing an outcome directly. It was about being someone whose word or whose bearing carried enough weight that people adjusted their own actions around it, because ignoring it would have been foolish and everyone knew that. Uenuku across the sky works the same way — visible, unmistakeable, refusing to argue his case twice, and entirely dependent on the people below actually stopping to look up before they walked on.
There is something for you in that, away from war parties and old journeys. Most of us are given signs before we commit to something difficult — a feeling, a piece of information, a warning from someone who knows more than we do — and the sign rarely insists on being obeyed. It simply stands there, plainly, waiting to be read properly, the way Uenuku still stands across the sky, and it is entirely on us whether we stop long enough to actually look at it before we go on.
Hei whakaaro · something to sit with
Ka tū te āniwaniwa ki te ara, ā, mā te tangata anō e pānui tika i taua tohu.
A sign standing across your path never argues its case twice. It waits to be read before you walk on.
What warning have you already been given about the thing you're about to do?