When the Wanderling was around eight years old, because of the death of his mother some years previously, he ended up living with his grandmother. During that period of his life the man that married his mother's sister committed suicide. When neighbors heard all the screaming, commotion, and running around surrounding the event several of them came over to lend assist in whatever manner they could. During the ensuing milieu the Wanderling was accidently knocked unconscious by a falling garage door. Caught up in the confusion surrounding the suicide he was all but forgotten. One of the neighbors found him and carried him into the house and put him onto his bed fully clothed. The police and an ambulance arrived and soon law enforcement and paramedics were running all over the place. Along the way the Wanderling was attended to and his head wound dressed.
Sometime way late into the night or the still-dark early morning hours he apparently got up and wandered off. It wasn't until after sunrise that a family member discovered he was gone and nowhere to be found.
In the meantime an old man driving a jeep on the way back to his home located far away somewhere out in the middle of desert found the Wanderling walking all alone along some road. How he got to where he was or when or where he was found was never learned. The story told by his grandmother was that the old man had no money so, in those long-before cell phone days, he wasn't able to make a phone call --- nor did he have a phone at his shack. Instead he took the Wanderling to the house of a woman friend of his even farther out in the desert, also with no phone. Some weeks later they took him into town and left him at the sheriffs office.
When the Wanderling's grandmother came to get him the sheriff said he had personally known the old man and woman for a very long time and that both were fine and good people. The man was a rough and tumble old guy who was known to have been a onetime a muleskinner or swamper for the 20 mule team borax wagons that used to make the trek up and out of Death Valley and across the desert. Now days the sheriff said, the old man spent most of his time in one fashion or the other participating in Native American sweat lodge ceremonies and most likely the Wanderling did too. The sheriff assured the grandmother there was no need to worry about anything related to the Wanderling's overall well being during the time he was in their company. According to the sheriff the two just didn't experience the passage of time like others seemed to. The period of time he was with them was really no more than just a matter of them coming into town relative to their needs.
When the Wanderling's grandmother picked him up, strung around his neck was a small cloth sack like a Bull Durham tobacco bag filled with 50 or more pieces of buckshot. The sheriff told her that one day when the old man did not return the woman and the Wanderling went out across the desert looking for him. Although they didn't find the old man during their search they did come across a fairly large but barely alive coyote that had been all shot up in the hindquarters and left rear leg by buckshot. They took the wounded coyote, a coyote that was easily twice the size of any normal one, back to the woman's shack then spent the rest of the night and all of the next day pulling buckshot out of the rear and back leg of the animal, throwing the little lead balls into a pan. The woman patched the coyote up as best she could and nursed him back to health over a couple of days. Then, with his strength regained, the coyote simply limped off into the sagebrush. However, before she turned the coyote loose she took the buckshot that had been removed from the wounded animal and counted the lead spheres out into two equal piles, putting one pile into a little cloth bag and the other pile into a second identical cloth bag. Then she put one bag around the Wanderling's neck and the other around the coyote's neck.
Before the Wanderling and his grandmother left, the sheriff told her the old man and woman had driven into town that day and if she wanted to thank them for caring for boy he could arrange it. The old man was sitting in the jeep on the passenger side alone when they drove up to meet them. The woman was just coming out of a nearby grocery store carrying a handfull of items. The Wanderling's grandmother said the old man excused himself for not getting out of the jeep during the introduction because he had taken a terrifically bad fall in the desert some days before having scraped up his rear and left leg so badly he could barely move. She talked with them for awhile, thanked them and left. Before they got home she removed the bag from around the Wanderling's neck because she was afraid, since it was filled with buckshot, that the sight of them might upset her daughter considering how her husband died. The Wanderling's grandmother also told him there must be some kind of desert tradition or something because the old man in the jeep had what appeared to be small sack of buckshot tied around his neck just like the Wanderling's --- a bag that seemed to be an EXACT duplicate of the one that had been tied around the Wanderling's neck.