Digital Wanderer

On Friday, my team lead told me the story of the Cow of the Baskervilles. It's a sad story, but what can you do.

There was once a drunkard who lived in a Latgalian village. He drank heavily, though not around the clock. He had a cow. As is customary, the cow was usually chained to a stake. But since the drunkard was too lazy to move the stake to a new spot, he would tether the cow to the same stake for weeks on end. Eventually, the cow did not merely graze on the grass but ate it down to the roots. By the time the drunkard finally overcame his laziness and retethered her, the cow's habitat already looked like a nuclear testing ground.

Not a single blade of grass or bush remained within the cow's reach, and this scorched earth was strictly in the shape of the most geometrically perfect figure—that is, a circle. Thus, the meadow where the cow grazed all summer looked as though it had been visited by aliens or the Universal Circular Self-Propelled Landing  Harvester from the book "Dunno in Sun City." From time to time, the drunkard forgot to retether or milk the cow. Unable to endure the torment, the cow figured out that she could drink her own milk to avoid dying.  But the drunkard was not happy with this arrangement, since it deprived him of one of his few sources of income. So he came up with the idea of putting a collar on the cow, studded on the outside with nails.

And now for the final apocalyptic scene. Night. Dozens of circles of scorched earth. In the center of one of the circles stands some ghastly creature wearing a collar with nails pointing outward, making a terrifying sound resembling the eerie howls of the Hound of the Baskervilles.
No wonder the villagers dubbed this creature the Cow of the Baskervilles. Despite the frightening name, they helped the cow whenever her mooing became completely unbearable.

And in the end, the drunkard burned down his house and moved with his family into the bathhouse.