In both, water is fire's declared enemy and a hollow tree is fire's ark: fire survives the water-siege only because a tree holds it. The Māori text runs the siege in reverse (rain sent to save the thief nearly annihilates fire itself, and the tree is the refuge OF fire), the Cherokee runs it forward (water blockades fire until a water-walking spider breaks the siege) — but the triangle fire/water/hollow-tree is identical, and in both the tree is where people still go to get fire back.
The fire-giver herself is nearly destroyed by water: Tawhiri-ma-tea's 'heavy lasting rain' quenches Mahuika's world-fire; 'before Mahuika could reach her place of shelter, she almost perished in the rain,' her nails all spent, her fire surviving only as refugee sparks sheltered inside the kaikōmako tree.
Fire's home is 'the bottom of a hollow sycamore tree which grew on an island'; the animals 'could not get to it on account of the water' — the world's only fire besieged on all sides by its opposite element, alive inside a tree.
Both passages verified verbatim in public-domain texts: Grey ('she almost perished in the rain... saved a few sparks which she threw, to protect them, into the Kaikomako') and Mooney ('fire into the bottom of a hollow sycamore tree which grew on an island... they could not get to it on account of the water').
Our fact-checkers corrected the first draft:
Fire is never taken by force; it crosses the forbidden gap concealed in a tiny carried container · a hollow stalk, a woven thimble-bowl · after strength has failed.
The fire-theft story ends, in both traditions, with fire deliberately deposited INSIDE named species of wood (and stone), where it still waits · the myth is a filing system: it records which materials hold latent fire, and the fire-drill or strike-a-light is the act of withdrawing the deposit.
The fire raid permanently brands the body of the animal who dared it: black feathers, red eyes, a burned-short bill.
The sky power answers the fire-theft not with death but with a permanent alteration of the thief's body · and in both cases the wound is generative rather than terminal: the liver regrows nightly forever; the shattered limbs become the joints every human needs to work, kneel, and forge.