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Frog lives low, in the wet grass, where the world is loud and close. Frog taught Buffalo that fear lives in the throat first. Before the story, before the verdict, the breath gets small and fast. You can't argue fear out of the throat. But you can breathe with it.
Frog sat in the creek grass while the whole field buzzed with danger. Buffalo came crashing through, sure the storm was after only him. Frog didn't tell him to calm down. Frog said, "Breathe with me. Three slow ones. The field is still here." Buffalo breathed. The field stayed. The fear didn't leave, but it stopped being the whole sky.
Frog teaches the breath. Not the fancy breath, not the performance breath. The slow one that says: I'm still here, the ground is still here.
Three slow breaths. In for four, out for longer than that. Don't try to feel better. Just keep the breath company while the fear moves through.
Tight chest. A text you can't answer. A room you have to walk into. The moment before words fail.
These are contemporary trail tales from Matthew J. Dyck's lived and imaginative world, offered in respect for oral storytelling as a living way of carrying teaching through relationship, land, weather, animals, and memory. They aren't presented as traditional teachings on behalf of any Indigenous nation or community.