RED LAKE, MINN. - A team of 10 volunteer searchers deployed Thursday to the yard where Tristan Anthony White, 4, and his brother, Avery Lee Stately, 2, were last seen.

The boys had been playing Wednesday morning outside their house in the woodsy Walking Shield area of Red Lake, and sometime between 9:30 and 9:50 they went missing.

"I had a dream last night, and I saw a hole," the search leader told his team members, assigned to comb through the bramble thickets behind the house.

"So look for holes."

But first, he gave each searcher a pinch of tobacco, and they took turns tossing it into a small wood fire burning in the yard.

The smoke rose, a plea for a successful search.

A man, a relative of the missing boys, stood by the fire and greeted each searcher in turn.

"Mii-gwetch," he said. "Thank you."

Searches by hundreds of volunteers, some on all-terrain vehicles or on horseback, some scouring the woods from the air, turned up no sign Thursday of the two young brothers.

"It's not been a very joyous Thanksgiving here," Red Lake Tribal Chairman Floyd (Buck) Jourdain Jr. said late Thursday, as darkness fell and the last of the search teams came out of the woods.

"Many of those people didn't eat dinner today," he said. "They've been out looking for those little boys. There are citizens from surrounding communities here, too."

About 20 FBI agents and personnel from the U.S. Border Patrol, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and other state and federal agencies joined the search Thursday, and efforts to find the missing boys are expected to resume this morning.

FBI special agent Paul McCabe said that scores of law enforcement officers also were investigating whether the boys might have been abducted.

"While this is going on out here," he said, gesturing toward searchers, "there's just as strenuous an effort going on to determine whether foul play may have been involved."

He said that no Amber Alert was issued "because it doesn't meet the criteria. You need some proof or information that they were abducted, and we don't have that.

"But what we're doing with the media, getting the word out, is about as good as an Amber Alert."

Jourdain also said there is "nothing to indicate the children have been abducted -- no evidence that someone pushed them into a car or something. But we aren't ruling out anything.

"They're so young, so small -- you wouldn't think they'd get very far on their own," he said. "We've looked high and low, but we can't find them.