Pele

In Kahiki, the distant homeland of the gods, the young Pele discovered fire and could not stop setting blazes, until she had set her own family's home alight. Her elder sister Namaka-o-kaha'i, a sea goddess, flooded the fires to save the island each time, and when Namaka threatened to submerge their home for good, Pele's parents sent her away by canoe. Other tellings give her no such disgrace: restless in Kahiki and longing to travel, she went to her brother Ka-moho-ali'i, who gave her a canoe with Tide and Current for paddlers, and she tucked her infant sister, born in the shape of an egg, under her arm, naming her Hi'iaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele, meaning in the armpit of Pele.

Whichever the cause, Pele sailed for Hawai'i in the canoe Honua-i-a-kea with her brothers Ka-moho-ali'i, Kane-milo-hai and Kane-apua, the gods Ku and Lono among those who paddled and bailed. She left Kane-milo-hai on one islet to stand guard and set Kane-apua down on another, but pity for her youngest brother made her lift him back aboard. As the canoe came to land and the household of gods stepped ashore, the gods of Kahiki burst into flame and roaring thunder. At Ni'ihau, the chiefess Fire-thrower gave the travellers a handsome welcome, and on Kaua'i, Pele appeared at a hula festival, fell for the young chief Lohiau, and resolved to take him for herself.

At island after island she dug into the ground to make a home, but water always defeated her fire, an element her flame could not survive. Only at Kilauea, an active crater on Mauna Loa, did she dig deep enough to strike no water at all, and there she settled for good.

Pele had sent her younger sister Hi'iaka to fetch her lover Lohiau from Kaua'i, but grew impatient when Hi'iaka failed to keep her promise to bring him back quickly. Furious at the delay, Pele set fire to the lehua forests of Puna that Hi'iaka loved, without waiting to hear the two women who travelled ahead explain what had kept them. Hi'iaka's dear friend Hopoe, caught dancing beside the sea as the flames reached her, was turned to stone in the shape of a dancer still balanced mid-step.

In open defiance, and in full view of her sister, Hi'iaka accepted Lohiau's embrace on the very rim of the crater. Pele called on her own sisters to consume him, but they pitied his beauty and refused; she invoked her fire gods next, but they too called her unjust and blew the flame away, and for their disloyalty she banished them to the barren lands of Huli-nu'u. Lohiau, being mortal, could not survive Pele's fire: she consumed him and threw him into the fiery pit of Halema'uma'u, and Hi'iaka dived in after him, digging furiously in an attempt to reach her true love.

Kahawali, a handsome young chief, lived near Kapoho in the Puna district in the days of the ruling chief Kahoukapu. He had a wife, two children named Paupoulu and Kaohe, a mother at Kuki'i, and a sister, Koae, at Kula; his father and another sister, Kane-wahine-keaho, lived on Oahu. Skilled in the hula and in riding the holua, a sled raced downhill over slippery grass much like snow-sledding, Kahawali arranged a race with his friend Ahua during the Lono festival, while the hula pupils had gathered for a public display. An old woman offered to compete against him, and Kahawali rebuffed her, not knowing she was Pele herself.

Enraged at his rebuff, Pele turned into a river of fire and pursued him down the hill. Kahawali fled first to the hill Pu'ukea, then hurried to bid goodbye to his wife and children, paused to say farewell to his favourite pig, Aloi-pua'a, and had just enough time to greet his sister at Kula before he escaped to the sea in a canoe his brother had opportunely brought to land. He never returned to his home again.