Beware the Flute of the Patupaiarehe

“Don’t stare at the woods too long, they don’t like it when strangers look straight at them.” 

Dad told Mum about the patupaiarehe, and how she should conduct herself in their unseen presence. 

Mum had thought he was being superstitious. Having grown up in the wop-wops, Dad held many outlandish beliefs that Mum was usually willing to indulge. But the idea that the patupaiarehe had evaded documentation for centuries and lurked in the bush to this day was too much, even for her. 

Defiant, she went to a window and stared into the woodland outside until it blended into a mosaic of greens. It must have been ten minutes of Mum staring at the forest and going cross-eyed. Just as she was about to scoff at his advice, a pair of pitch-black eyes peered through the bushes and blinked back at her.  

The shock of it sent her reeling, and she knocked her head into the cupboards behind her. Dad iced the bump on her head. “That blink was a warning,” he said. He told her the story of how his sister almost married a patupaiarehe. 

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My Koro woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, ears ringing with the sound of cackles. His instinct pulled him to check on his second daughter’s bedroom.  

His daughter, Hinerehia, had always liked to sleep with the windows open, a trait that my dad said I inherited from her. But that winter night, my Koro burst into Hinerehia’s room to find her bed empty and her curtains twirling with a mist that had invaded his home.  

Koro didn’t bother looking for his daughter in the house, he broke the backdoor and raced through his paddock. The dew from the fog threatened every step, and he could see no sign of Hinerehia through the fog. But by that point, he didn’t need to.  

Coming from the edge of his paddock, where our family farm meets untamed bush, was the sweet tones of a pūtōrino flute. He reached blindly through the fog and notes, clawing at the sound until he felt the damp cotton of Hinerehia’s nightgown. He dug his fingers into the fabric and wrenched her away from the sound. As he did Hinerehia cried out, and Koro saw something pale and solid shift through the mist towards them. He kept his eyes locked on the hint of movement and dragged his daughter back home as she kicked and screamed. Through her bewitched frenzy, Koro caught one desperate call from her. 

“Let me go! He loves me! He wants to marry me!” 

Koro persisted. Through the fog, his daughter’s sobs, and the pūtōrino’s sickly sweet song, he pulled his daughter into their home and away from the black eyes that he could not see but knew were surely watching him.  

Then, he cooked until dawn. Boil-up with doughboys, mussels on the verge of going off, leftover stuffing with pumpkin. Anything and everything he could find and put on his stove. He encouraged Hinerehia to eat occasionally, kneeling to meet her red-rimmed eyes and nudging plates into her shaking palms. But her eating wasn’t his priority so much as cooking itself was. Because as long as there was food on the stove and the smell wafted out into the mist, it would repulse Hinerehia’s would-be-husband enough to stay away. 

When dawn finally spilled over the distant mountains and the fog began to creep away from the house, Koro turned his stove off, and reached out to his Hinerehia to fold her into his arms. 

From that day on he kept a close ear out and watched for signs of longing in her. In a few days the spell had seemingly broken, and she was the same as she had always been, laughing and bickering with her siblings. But every other Winter, when the fog settled over the house in a thick blanket, Hinerehia could be found staring out of a permanently locked window.  

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In all honesty, I sometimes question if Dad was telling the truth. Knowing him it’s likely that he was, but on late winter nights I tell myself he wasn’t, and neither are the patupaiarehe. Those whispers in the dark are the only thing that quell the tug in my stomach and drown out the sound of a pūtōrino playing in the distance.