Maui

Days had grown too short to finish anything. The sun crossed the sky so fast that a man could barely start a task before night fell again, and the short nights left no one properly rested, so Maui decided the sun itself had to be caught and slowed. His brothers doubted a man could get near something so hot, but Maui reminded them of the things he had already managed to do, and they agreed to try. The brothers spent days plaiting flax rope, working out new ways to plait it as they went, until they had rope enough for a noose. Carrying the ropes, provisions and Maui's enchanted jawbone, the party walked only by night on the long road east, hiding themselves by day so the sun would not see them coming, and when they reached the pit the sun rose from, they built walls of clay and screens of boughs to hide behind.

Maui told his brothers to stay hidden until the sun's head and forelegs were caught fast, then haul the ropes tight from both sides while he went in close with the jawbone, and whatever the sun's screaming, they were not to let the ropes go slack out of pity. It went as planned. Beaten half senseless, the sun begged Maui to stop, admitted he could no longer keep up his old pace after such a thrashing, and agreed to cross the sky slowly from then on. Other tellings put different tools in Maui's hands: a Tahitian version has him tying ten ropes straight to the sun's own rays, with the strongest rope spun from his sister Hina's hair, and Robert Craig's telling drops the brothers and the jawbone altogether, arming Maui with a rope of his sister's hair and a club from his grandmother instead. A South Island telling skips the roping entirely and has the sun bargain over how long it takes Hina to cook a meal. In the Hawaiian telling the whole scene moves to a wiliwili tree, where Maui first has to win over a blind grandmother by stealing the bananas she is cooking before she will help him snare the sun's rays as it rises.

Maui put out every fire in the village so that someone would have to go down to Mahuika and ask her for more. No one else dared face her, so Maui volunteered and got his parents' permission to go himself. Underground he found Mahuika and asked her for fire, and she pulled off one of her burning fingernails and gave it to him. Maui walked a little way off, put the flame out on purpose, then went back and said it had gone out by accident and asked for another. She gave him a second nail, then a third, working through all ten fingers and on into her toes, never once suspecting what he was doing until only one nail, on her last toe, was left.

When Maui asked for that last nail too, Mahuika understood she had been played for a fool. She wrenched it out and hurled it at the ground instead of handing it over, and the whole country caught fire at once. Maui turned himself into an eagle and flew for his life, but the flames kept pace with him even over water, so he called on his ancestors Tawhiri-ma-tea and Whatitiri-matakataka to send rain enough to drown the fire before it drowned him. It worked, though Mahuika saved what she could of the fire from the flood by throwing the last sparks into the trees. Best records that the littlest of her flame-children escaped that way into a tree called Hine-kaikomako, and Cook Islands and Moriori tellings agree that Maui ended up putting fire into wood and stone rather than losing it altogether, which is why it can still be rubbed out on two sticks today. One telling has Maui take the form of an owl and then a sparrow-hawk instead of an eagle as he flees, and gives Mahuika male pronouns throughout their meeting even while naming her Mahuika and having the hero introduce himself by his usual name, Maui-tikitiki-o-Taranga.

Maui's telling of how dogs began starts with a grudge against his own brother-in-law, Irawaru. In one account the two men go fishing together and Irawaru keeps catching fish while Maui's hook, which has no barb to it, catches nothing; when Maui finally examines his brother-in-law's line he finds it barbed, and his anger curdles from there. In another account the two are walking home from a visit when Maui asks Irawaru to carry some food for the journey and Irawaru refuses, so Maui uses his powers to stretch the road out under their feet until they are both faint with hunger, having quietly kept his own food back for himself. Either way, once they reach the beach and haul up their canoe, Maui asks Irawaru to crawl underneath the outrigger and take its weight on his back. As soon as he is under it, Maui jumps on top and presses the whole weight of the canoe down on him, then tramples his body, stretches his backbone out into a tail, and turns him into the first dog anyone had ever seen.

Maui went home and told his sister Hina that her husband was waiting for her on the beach. When she got there and called his name, it was a dog that came bounding out of the bushes to her, barking and wagging its tail, and Maui's people have called their dogs to them with the same call ever since. Hina was distraught. She went back to the village weeping, took up an enchanted girdle, and threw herself into the sea to drown rather than live with what had become of her husband. Best records still other versions of the quarrel from different districts: in one, Irawaru simply ate all the bait on a fishing trip; in a South Island telling collected separately, the culprit is not Irawaru at all but a brother of Maui's who happens to share his mother's name Taranga, turned into a dog and renamed Irawaru after eating Maui's food.