Bannimashto

As a man of Bajhang was returning after completing a pilgrimage to Badrinath, a shining stone of a sky-like colour somehow came to fall into his bag.

Thinking it a useless stone, he threw it away on the path again and again, yet at every halt the stone found its way back into his bag by itself. In the end that stone reached all the way to his home in Bajhang.

That very night a voice came in a dream: "I am the Mashto deity. For as many times as you threw me away on the path, only after that many generations will your lineage receive royal glory."

Then he built an altar and installed that stone as "Bannimashto" (the Mashto who came from Badrinath), and began to worship it daily. In the course of time his descendants obtained a kingdom, and the place where that capital stood came to be called "Bannikot".

Later the Mashto deity set out to wander village to village in the form of a striped cat. In Kyundal village he became famous and worshipped throughout the world as "Latomashto", and because the stone swelled mightily when milk was offered at Baskot, he became renowned and worshipped as "Dugdhashila Mashto" (the milk-stone Mashto).