Taketake, a chief who lived at Atene and Koriniti. Thousands Lived on Wanganui River In the beginning, all the mountains in the North Island lived peacefully together in the centre of the island, until a time came when they began to quarrel. In one of these quarrels Taranaki, which is known now as Mt Egmont, attempted to carry off the mountain Pihanga, the wife of the mountain Tongariro. He was defeated in battle by Tongariro, and fled in the night, his weight dragging in the earth a deep furrow which became the Wanganui (or Whanganui) River. Later, the great navigator Kupe is said to have stayed at the river for a time, and then came the canoe Aotea, with its captain Turi. The people of this canoe intermarried with tribes already there, and it is mostly from them that the tribes of Wanganui trace their descent. It was soon after the coming of the Aotea that the taniwha Tutae-poroporo lived; his story is told on page three of this issue of Te Ao Hou. There used to be many other taniwha as well; every pa had one, and many of them were tame. But it is said that most of them were frightened away when the pakeha steam-boats came to the river at the end of last century. There used to be thousands of people living along the river, in places where only hundreds, or none at all, live now. There were pas on every important hill, with the river as the road between them. The river was full of eels and fish, and the up-river people would often paddle down to the coast in summer to fish and garden. There were great slopes of kumara plantations high up the river, too, for it is very sunny there, and protected from frost. As in so many other places in New Zealand, when you go there you are shown hill-sides covered with scrub and bush, and told, ‘the old people used to have kumaras all the way up those hills once. But nothing grows there now’. There were a great many battles on the Wanganui, but until the pakehas came the people were fairly well protected, because they could always