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 the Giant Rabbit, he is always referred to as a man, a giant or demigod perhaps, but distinctly as of human nature, the mighty father or elder brother of the race.[1] [Footnote 1: The writers from whom I have taken this myth are Nicolas Perrot, _Memoire sur les Meurs, Coustumes et Relligion des Sauvages de l'Amerique Septentrionale_, written by an intelligent layman who lived among the natives from 1665 to 1699; and the various _Relations des Jesuites_, especially for the years 1667 and 1670.] Such is the national myth of creation of the Algonkin tribes, as it has been handed down to us in fragments by those who first heard it.