People of the Silence by Kathleen O'Neal & Gear Gear

the old woman had been the last person in her house before Sand Melon had returned home. But no evidence could be found.
    Still, people watched Pocket Gopher closely now, and if she had been seen in the burial grounds … Blessed thlatsinas! Perhaps she was a witch.
    “I don’t believe it,” Cornsilk said. “People accuse me of being a witch, and I’m not.”
    “I know that.”
    Cornsilk pushed the flour to the side of the grinding slab and scooped more coarse meal onto the fine-grained slab. “It’s just the weather. People are worried.” She pounded the meal.
    “The weather and the raiding,” Leafhopper corrected.
    “They go together. Each summer without rain makes things worse. More and more witches are being accused and killed. And I…” She tilted her head at the blasphemy. “I’m not sure they are to blame.”
    Leafhopper sat back on her heels and wiped her meal-covered hands on her dress hem while she gazed at Cornsilk. “Then who is?”
    “I don’t know! Maybe … maybe the First People at Talon Town. We send them corn and pots and everything else we make. All that, and they’re supposed to talk to the gods so it will rain. They’re the ones who always start the wars. Not only that…” Cornsilk leaned forward to whisper, “I heard that Chief Crow Beard keeps corpse powder in his chamber to use against his enemies! Maybe he’s the witch!”
    Leafhopper set the black-and-white bowl at the bottom of her grinding slab and pulled the coarse red meal into it. She had clamped her lower lip between her teeth, thinking.
    Cornsilk kept grinding.
    There were two kinds of “people” in the world: First People and Made People. The First People were descendants of those who had bravely climbed through the four underworlds, led by a blue-black wolf, and emerged from the darkness into this fifth world of light. All First People lived in Straight Path Canyon. The four clans of the Straight Path nation were, on the other hand, Made People. The Creator had “made” them from animals to provide company for the First People after their emergence. The Bear Clan, the Buffalo Clan, the Coyote Clan, and Cornsilk’s own people, the Ant Clan, had been the creatures their names implied. Through the miracle of the Creator’s divine breath, they had changed into humans. But the First People saw them as inferiors because they had once been animals, while the First People had always been humans.
    Outsiders, like the Mogollon, the Hohokam, and the northern Tower Builders, were not people at all. Despite their human bodies, the Straight Path people knew they had the souls of beasts. Why, the Mogollon’s own legends said they had once lived as fiery wolves in Father Sun’s heart and been cast out because they started chewing up his body. As they ran through the heavens toward earth, their blazing wolf bodies had transformed into human shapes. To this day the Straight Path people called them Fire Dogs, for their souls remained predators, watching, waiting for the right time to kill.
    The Fire Dogs could not be trusted. They didn’t think like humans.
    Cornsilk wondered how the elders of the Made People clans got along at Talon Town. Each clan sent their greatest leader to live among the First People, to help and advise them on the ways of the world. The Made People had, after all, lived here much longer than the First People. But Cornsilk had heard that the First People routinely treated their clan leaders little better than Fire Dog slaves.
    Sternlight, the legendary Sunwatcher, had the worst reputation. The Straight Path nation had been suffering from drought for sixteen summers, and where once the clans had looked to Sternlight for guidance, now they openly accused him of witchcraft.
    Power flowed through everything in the world, from the smallest dandelion seed floating across the desert to the grandest of the Comet People. Priests and shamans called upon Power to help their peoples, to bring health, assure good