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In the beginning, as many Indigenous American tales go, the world was covered with water. A giant turtle floated. Animals swam without ceasing. Some took turns attempting to dive down to the sea floor for dirt that they could use to turn the turtle into land, where they could rest and grow. Muskrat was the last to try. The creature held its breath and dove as deep as it could. It disappeared in the depths.

How could it come down to this? The future of all life resting on the back of a turtle and in the paws of a rodent?

Muskrat surfaced! It clutched fistfuls of dirt from the ocean floor and patted them onto the back of the giant turtle. This dirt would become our dirt; the turtle would become our continent.

The Ocracoke Lighthouse guides incoming seafarers into Silver Lake Harbor. photograph by Chansak Joe/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Another creation story, a scientific one, is the story of our Outer Banks. It also has turtles and muskrats. Most ocean islands formed when volcanoes spit their bedrock of lava out from beneath Earth’s crust. The creatures and plants that dwell there now arrived by happenstance — by swimming or flying or washing ashore.

Our Outer Banks, however, did not come from volcano fire. Instead, these islands formed from the freezing and melting of glaciers. Unlike volcanic islands, alone at sea, the Outer Banks’ land has always been our land, now stranded in the ocean. Their plants and animals are our plants and animals, now held fast by the Pamlico Sound and the Atlantic.

• • •

Ocracoke Island can only be reached by boat or plane. Because it’s surrounded by water, it holds tighter to its animals than islands with bridges that connect land to land. And so, the small island, fewer than nine square miles, holds vast life.

Peter Vankevich found Ocracoke’s birds in the 1980s. While taking the ferry from Hatteras to Ocracoke, he had an epiphany: “This was protected land. It will never be developed.” This was the place he wanted to be, stranded on the small strip of land with his birds.

Thirty years later, Ocracoke made room for him. He now co-owns the Ocracoke Observer newspaper, helps run the local radio station, works as a volunteer firefighter, and still has time to play poker with the locals on Friday nights.

The island holds Vankevich just as it holds the Banker ponies rumored to have wandered off Sir Richard Grenville’s ship Tiger when it ran aground in the 1500s.

It holds the bulrush, and the seaside goldenrod, too, that make strange noises when wind winnows through. It holds glass lizards — legless, snake-looking creatures whose tails “shatter” by breaking off, sometimes in pieces, if you try to grab them.

It cradles migrating birds in the soft sands and sea oaks, gives them shelter and nurseries, and food for their journeys.

It holds ancient turtles. Five of the world’s seven sea turtle species swim ashore to mingle with the six year-round resident species. Like the origin story, these turtles carry whole worlds on their carapaces. Sea turtles hold ecosystems of globe-traveling crabs and barnacles; the land- and marsh-dwellers carry the shapes and patterns of their ancient ancestors on that living bone of their shells.

“In Ocracoke, we live on the edge, psychologically, physically,” Vankevich says. “That’s why I like it here. You feel like you’re out in nature here. The edge is where you see nature at its strongest.”

Storms blow unexpected visitors onto the island. “We’ve had coconuts on the beach, gooseneck barnacles clinging to things, odd seashells,” he says. “Some things come in and they leave.”

Everyone remembers the black bear who swam from Portsmouth Island, spent a few days wandering the village, and swam back.

Others visitors come to stay.

• • •

A boardwalk leads to Ocracoke’s stout little lighthouse. On one side, the ground is muddy and thick with marsh plants, parted in places by a network of paths. Each day, at dawn and dusk, the path makers reveal themselves: nutria, bushy-furred and hungry.

These rodents gather marsh plants, their partially webbed hind feet making gentle slaps on the mud. They gather as families and associates, in much the same way muskrats once gathered before the lighthouse beamed its first ray across the sea. Those muskrats gathered even before the dreamers who believed this earth could’ve been formed on the back of a gentle giant by the determination of a humble rodent.

Take a close look around Ocracoke Lighthouse and its boardwalk, and you might catch a glimpse of a relatively recent addition to the island: the South American nutria. photograph by Todd Pusser

After the collapse of the fur trade in the 1940s, nutria were released into the wild and found their way to Ocracoke. Even though nutrias’ burrows weaken roads and their appetite for marsh plants diminishes the island’s natural strongholds against weather, Ocracoke holds them the way it holds the rest of its living things: generously and without judgment.

Creation stories come because we watch the world as it is and wonder how it could have begun. We see life brimming from a house built on sand. We see the might and tremor of a whole made from strange and separate pieces, and we know it all had to come from something, all must be going somewhere.

The muskrats may be gone, but every sunrise and sunset, nutria grab that earth in their paws. Offshore, sea turtles still float while the whole wide world swims around them.