Turtle (Maidu Anosma) is the earth-diver of the Maidu creation. With the Father-of-the-Secret-Society he is already afloat on a raft upon the shoreless primal waters when Earth-Initiate comes down from the sky on the feather rope. When the creator wishes for land, it is Turtle who offers to dive; a rock is bound to his arm and a rope to his body, and he sinks for what the myth reckons as years before he returns to the surface, his shell green with slime, bearing under his nails the few grains of mud that the creator rolls into a ball and grows into the whole world. The earth-diver motif that he embodies is one of the most widespread of North American creation themes, and the green-shelled Turtle who raises the first soil makes the Maidu a Turtle-Island people.