Kaia is the Tolai name for the malignant spirit-power of the wild, the dangerous being of the bush, the deep places, and the volcanic ground, feared as a bringer of sickness, madness, and death. Unlike the departed dead, who may be approached and placated, the kaia is wholly hostile and alien to human society; it lurks in lonely forest, ravine, and crater, and an encounter with it can sicken or kill. Ethnographers record kaia both as a class of such demons and as a singular dread presence bound up with the underworld and the smoking mountains behind Rabaul. It stands at the far pole from the ordering work of the creator brothers, an embodiment of everything untamed and deadly in the Tolai world.