This is one of the most famous of the Hawaiian stories. It is given in
the Fornander Collection, Vol. V, Part I, of the Memoirs of the Bernice
Pauahi Bishop Museum, with the title He Kaao no Hiku a me Kawelu, the
Legend of Hi-ku and Ka-we-lu. It should be remembered that Hi-ku’s
arrow was more for casting than for shooting: the game that he was
playing at the opening of the story consisted in casting his arrow,
Pua-ne, over a distance. Ka-we-lu was living under tapu. But, like many
another heroine of Polynesian romance, she was not reluctant about
having the tapu broken. There is one very puzzling feature in this
story. Why did Ka-we-lu not give her lover food? Her failure to provide
something for him is against all traditions of Hawaiian hospitality. Of
course, in the old days, men and women might not eat together;
Ka-we-lu, however, could have indicated to Hi-ku where to go for food.
The food at hand might have been for women only, and tapu as regards
men. Or it might have been tapu for all except people of high rank. If
this was what was behind Ka-we-lu’s inhospitality it would account for
a bitterness in Hi-ku’s anger—she was treating him as a person of a
class beneath her. But these are guesses merely. I have asked those who
were best acquainted with the Hawaiian tradition to clear up the
mystery of Ka-we-lu’s behavior in this particular, but they all
confessed themselves baffled by it. The poems that Ka-we-lu chants to
Hi-ku, like the poems that Ha-le-ma-no chants to Kama, have a meaning
beneath the ostensible meaning of the words.
With regard to Ka-we-lu’s death it should be remembered that according
to Polynesian belief the soul was not single, but double. A part of it
could be separated or charmed away from the body; the spirit that could
be so separated from the body was called hau. In making the connection
between Hi-ku and the lost Ka-we-lu I have gone outside the legend as
given in the Fornander Collection. I have brought in Lolupe, who finds
lost and hidden things. This godling is connected with the
Hi-ku-Ka-we-lu story through a chant given by Dr. Nathaniel Emerson in
his notes to David Malo’s Hawaiian Antiquities.
Mr. Joseph Emerson gives this account of Lua o Milu, the realm of Milu,
the Hawaiian Hades: “Its entrance, according to the usual account of
the natives, was situated at the mouth of the great valley of Waipio,
on the island of Hawaii, in a place called Keoni, where the sands have
long since covered up and concealed from view this passage from the
upper to the nether world.” Fornander says that the realm of Milu was
not entirely dark. “There was light and there was fire in it.” The
swing chant that I have given to Hi-ku does not belong to the legend;
it is out of a collection of chants that accompany games. The Hawaiian
swing was different from ours; it was a single strand with a
cross-piece, and it was pulled and not pushed out.
Mr. Joseph Emerson, in a paper that I have already quoted from, The
Lesser Hawaiian Gods, says that Hi-ku’s mother was Hina, the wife of
Ku, one of the greater Polynesian gods. In that case, Hi-ku was
originally a demi-god.