Josiah: My Aunt Audrey was telling me about when, because she was with Tatay and Tatay was more or less raised around Pyewtolekt . She was talking about one of the stories that she learned from Tatay was that when he was just little, he must have been like five years old or something like that, just a little boy. She said that he still remembers when Tatay would come and get him up in the morning and he would tell him go down there and jump in the river now, go down there and break the ice and bathe because we got a long day ahead of us. He would do it. He would go down there and break the ice, jump in, wash himself up and then he’d get out and run all the way back up to the teepee and said that by the time he would get back to the teepee his brains were just ice, solid ice. That just shows the discipline that even the real young children had at that time and confronting basically the fear of cold water.

Leroy: Yeah I know that is all true because that is what my uncle did to, my Uncle Howard Davis did to Del, my brother and I. I know I told the story I don’t know how many times but it is one of the best lessons I’ve had in life and it has given me strength mentally, physically. I am not afraid of winter because of that, and that is really a strong, it is a powerful gift. It makes you more of a friend or an ally or whatever you want to call it, a part, it brings you close to Mother Earth that way. Yeah, someone could tell me right now to go down and break the ice and jump in and there’s no problem. There’s no question, you don’t even think about it. It is what we had to do. When we were younger, 9 and 7 or something like that, they took us down there early in the morning and it was kind of dark and you had to break up the ice like that. He says I am going to go in and you boys come in after I get out. He got out so we got in there and you have to move those big clumps of ice around because they always come back you know if you don’t have a place to push them. So when we got out he told us to dry off real quick so we could run back up to the house. That is the way our hair was, too, little icicles. You could here them as you were running, clink, clink, clink, clink. I haven’t done that to my grandsons but I did that to my son at Yellowstone River.