Sources: folkloric
An original retelling of the recorded traditional narrative cited here. The sequence of events and ending are retained in modern language.
The story
Simas Balukonis was ploughing his field. Although the day was warm, a stranger wearing a white fur coat approached. He asked the ploughman to wake him when clouds gathered, then lay down to sleep.
When thunder began, Balukonis went to wake him. Instead of a man, he found a black dog curled up on a stump. The ploughman crossed himself and stepped away.
Lightning struck. The stump where the sleeper had taken refuge burned up.
Reading the story
The changed appearance explains the unusual request: the stranger and the black dog are the same devil hiding from Perkūnas. The ploughman does not become its rescuer.
The anthology reproduces a text from Eduardas Volteris’s account of his 1887 ethnographic journey, p. 10. Its final claim that this happened more than a hundred years earlier belongs to the narrator’s account; it does not establish a verified event date.
Source and retelling
Lietuvių tautosaka, IV (1967), Nr. 502, p. 524: „Perkūnas ir miegantis velnias“. An original retelling of the recorded traditional narrative cited here. The sequence of events and ending are retained in modern language.