e otter?

In the midst of their distress the (female) muskrat came forward and
announced her willingness to make the attempt. Her proposal was received
with derision, but as poor help is better than none in an emergency, the
Rabbit gave her permission, and down she dived. She too remained long,
very long, a whole day and night, and they gave her up for lost. But at
length she floated to the surface, unconscious, her belly up, as if dead.
They hastily hauled her on the raft and examined her paws one by one. In
the last one of the four they found a small speck of mud. Victory! That
was all that was needed. The muskrat was soon restored, and the Giant
Rabbit, exerting his creative power, moulded the little fragment of soil,
and as he moulded it, it grew and grew, into an island, into a mountain,
into a country, into this great earth that we all dwell upon. As it grew
the Rabbit walked round and round it, to see how big it was; and the story
added that he is not yet satisfied; still he continues his journey and his
labor, walking forever around and around the earth and ever increasing it
more and more.

The animals on the raft soon found homes on the new earth. But it had yet
to be covered with forests, and men were not born. The Giant Rabbit formed
the trees by shooting his arrows into the soil, which became tree trunks,
and, transfixing them with other arrows, these became branches; and as for
men, some said he formed them from the dead bodies of certain animals,
which in time became the "totems" of the Algonkin tribes; but another and
probably an older and truer story was that he married the muskrat which
had been of such service to him, and from this union were born the
ancestors of the various races of mankind which people the earth.

Nor did he neglect the children he had thus brought into the world of his
creation. Having closely studied how the spider spreads her web to catch
flies, he invented the art of knitting nets for fish, and taught it to his
descendants; the pieces of native copper found along the shores of Lake
Superior he took from his treasure house inside the earth, where he
sometimes lives. It is he who is the Master of Life, and if he appears in
a dream to a person in danger, it is a certain sign of a lucky escape. He
confers fortune in the chase, and therefore the hunters invoke him, and
offer him tobacco and other dainties, placing them in the clefts of rocks
or on isolated boulders. Though called t