Dharti Mata, Mother Earth, is among the most intimately felt of Baiga deities: the soil is her living body, easily wounded and quick to anger. It is the daily duty of every Baiga to care for her, and the tribe's celebrated refusal to break the earth with an iron plough, keeping instead to bewar shifting cultivation, rests on the conviction that ploughing lacerates her flesh. In the creation myth the freshly made earth rocked and would not settle until the first Baiga sacrificed a sow to her, whereupon her blood-fed body grew still and she vowed, 'When I am angry and will listen to no one in the world, I will listen to you.' Some accounts make her the very mother from whom Nanga Baiga and Nanga Baigin were born, though other tellings give the first pair a different origin.