The Great Elk is the world-shaping animal person of the Osage genesis. When the sky-born ancestors came down and found the earth still covered with water, the Elk threw himself upon the flood and, thrashing, caused the ground to appear. Then rolling his body over the wet earth he loosened his hairs, which clung to the soil and sprang up as the grasses, the trees, and all the growing things, making the world fit for the people to live upon. He is honored as one of the great life-symbols of the Osage divisions, a figure of the earth's fertility and of the power that turned bare ground into a living land.