A cowherd took his cattle to graze in the forest. One of the calves was always straying from the herd. One day, out of anger, he killed it and threw the dead calf into a stream.

A few days later, the villagers went to catch fish in the stream and went into the water. The cowherd was with them. All the others caught fish, but he got nothing. Then the bones of the calf caught his feet, and he cried, ‘Baa! Baa!’ like a calf. His friends ran to help him and found his feet stuck in the calf’s head. When they saw that, the cowherd told them what he had done, and he collected the bones and the head and carried them home. When nobody was looking, he put the head of the calf in a pot and set it on the fire to cook, but when he sat down for supper, the head jumped out of the pot and smashed all the vessels in the house and then beat him until he died

A folktale sourced from Folk Tales of Mahakoshal by Verrier Elwin.

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