Search for brothers, ages 4 and 2, enters 3rd day at northern Minnesota reservation

Friday, November 24th 2006, 9:30 am

By: News On 6

RED LAKE, Minn. (AP) Hundreds of searchers used horses, four-wheelers and bloodhounds Friday to hunt for two young brothers who disappeared from a yard on an American Indian reservation two days earlier.

The FBI offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of Tristan Anthony White, 4, and Avery Lee Stately, 2.

The boys were reported missing Wednesday from the Walking Shield area of the remote Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, the FBI said.

Their parents said they had been playing outside their home, Tribal Chairman Floyd ``Buck'' Jourdain Jr. said.

``They were out there one minute, and they didn't hear them or see them outside the house,'' Jourdain said.

FBI spokesman Paul McCabe said it was too soon to tell if the boys wandered away or if a crime had been committed. ``At this point, there's nothing to indicate either way,'' he said.

Temperatures, which fell to 25 degrees overnight, were expected to reach the mid-40s Friday.

The area is mostly wetlands, lakes and woods. No tracks or broken ice had been found to suggest the boys went into the water, Jourdain said.

Searchers, many of them volunteers who put aside plans to help Thursday, also were looking through houses in the neighborhood.

``It's not been a very joyous Thanksgiving here,'' Jourdain said.

The turmoil over two of the reservation's children comes less than two years after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed his grandfather and grandfather's girlfriend on the reservation March 21, 2005, then went to the high school and killed seven more people, including a teacher and a security guard, before killing himself.