Badger (illustrated by Max Rugers)

In Dream Hunters, there was a monk who lived in solitude next to a temple in the mountains.

One day a fox and a badger passed by the temple and saw the monk working in his garden.

The Badger challenged the Fox to a wager that whoever could force the monk to flee from the mountain would be able to live in the temple. Living in a temple was far more comfortable than living in a badger’s set or a fox’s den. The fox agreed to the wager.

The badger attempted to run off the Monk first, by pretending to be a group of men sent by the Emperor to bring the Monk back to the imperial palace and become the the minister to the imperial court. The monk proclaimed he would leave immediately after the leader of the men answered one question, why the emperor would send a badger to tell him to go to the imperial court. The badger slunk away defeated.

The fox, then, tried to lure the monk away from the temple disguised as a beautiful woman, who was the daughter of a governor. The monk, in his surprise, asked how the daughter of the governor happened to be a fox.

The Monk was not surprised when, a few nights later, a group of demons appeared outside the temple demanding that he run. Of course, the monk did not run, but instead confronted the demons with a flaming torch and threw it at one of the demons, who happened to be the Badger. The badger’s butt was burned and he howled in pain and disappeared into the night.

This badger appears in Dream Hunters on pages 2-13 and in the P. Craig Russell version of Dream Hunters in issue # 1, on pages 4-9 and 14-19.