Te rerenga ki te moana

Ikatere was a son of Punga, grandson of Tangaroa, and until the day Tāwhirimātea's storm broke over the sea, he lived alongside his brother Tū-te-wehiwehi without either of them needing to know exactly what they would do if everything turned dangerous at once. That is true of most families, most of the time — the deep differences in how people respond to fear stay comfortably untested until a real crisis forces the question.

When Tāwhirimātea came down in his fury at what had been done to his parents, the sea was one of his primary targets, and the violence of that storm on open water must have been extraordinary — enough to send an entire branch of a family into a life-defining argument about where survival actually lay.

Ikatere's instinct, when the storm hit, was to go further into the water rather than away from it. This deserves a moment of real consideration rather than being read simply as recklessness. The sea was the source of the danger in one sense, but it was also, in another sense, the only home Ikatere and his family had ever properly known — Tangaroa's own domain, his own grandfather's realm. Going deeper was not necessarily running toward the danger blindly. It may well have been trusting that a being who belonged utterly to the sea would be safer staying within it, submerging below the worst of the surface violence, than trying to survive on land, a realm his family had no real relationship with or understanding of.

His brother disagreed entirely. Tū-te-wehiwehi wanted to flee to land, to get his people out of the water altogether and find shelter under Tāne's forest. The two of them argued, and it is said plainly in the tellings that neither could persuade the other. This was not a disagreement that got resolved through better arguing or more patience. It was a fundamental difference in what each brother believed safety actually meant, and in the end, with the storm not waiting for them to agree, they each acted on their own judgement and went separate ways.

Ikatere took his people into the deep water, and there they became the ancestors of every fish in the sea — every kind of ika that has ever swum since traces its line back to that decision, made under real duress, to trust the ocean rather than flee it.

There is something worth noticing in the way this whakapapa treats that choice. It does not frame Ikatere's decision as either braver or more foolish than his brother's. It simply follows the consequence of it through, generation after generation, all the way down to the fish that fill the nets and lines of people fishing today. Every one of those fish carries, in a sense, the memory of an ancestor who decided, in a moment of genuine terror, that the water itself would be safer than leaving it.

The parting with his brother was not a clean, mutual decision to go different ways and stay in touch. It was a rupture, and the tellings are honest that the two lines of descendants have essentially lived apart ever since — the fish of the sea and the reptiles of the land, cousins by blood but living in entirely separate worlds, meeting rarely if at all. That tension between sea people and land people, in the more human sense the story is often used to explain, is not treated as a small thing to be smoothed over. It is presented as a real and lasting consequence of a single argument that could not be resolved in time.

What is worth taking from Ikatere's part in this, on an ordinary day, is something about trusting your own knowledge of your own environment even when someone you love, under the same pressure, is convinced the opposite response is the only safe one. Ikatere did not go into the water because he was unafraid. He went because he understood the sea, in a way his brother perhaps did not, and he trusted that understanding when it mattered most. That is not always the right call. But it is, at the very least, a defensible one, and the whakapapa lets it stand as exactly that — not a triumph, not a failure, simply the choice that produced every fish that has ever swum since.