Aziz's village consisted of 'upper' and 'lower' Turi Khuz. The two sides of Turi Khuz had been feuding since the 1930's! As we crossed the stony plain we had so wearily traversed the night, separating Aziz's village of scattered houses and the neighboring sparse village, he told me the story of the two village's warring.
In the 1920's there was a British Political Agent in Chitral named Mr. Smyth. His servant was a man from the other village. Fighting in Afghanistan for the British (therefore Mr. Smyth), he was wounded and lost his arm. He went to Mr. Smyth and demanded some sort of compensation. Smyth asked him what he wanted and he said he wanted the entire village in which his family lived. Smyth didn't know or care about the people in the village. By simply signing a piece of paper he gave it to the man. But the village was composed of two families. There was a meeting in Chitral over the issue. Aziz's grandfather, representing his family and thus the other side, argued with Smyth.
"Don't you know other families live in the village?" he demanded.
"I don't care." was Smyth's flippant response, as was his attitude in general.
They argued and Aziz's grandfather got so upset that he picked up the bread and threw it in Smyth's face. Smyth branded Aziz's grandfather as a rebel and outlaw, and banished him from returning to Chitral. When the servant died he didn't leave any children, so he gave all his lands back to the Mether of Chitral. But his relatives still claimed it was their land.
And since that time the fields between the two families villages became a rocky no man's land, as the two families continued to fight over the land. They are poor and don't have many guns, so they usually would fight with stones. Sometimes they would set up some gun posts and do some shooting. Then the police would come up from Chitral and arrest some of them and take them to Boonie, the political center for Northern Chitral. There each side would fill out a list of the chief offenders, and five or six from each side are taken to jail in Chitral, where they would spend approximately a week.
It was war on a rather primitive scale. The previous year the enemy tribe had stolen the millstones from Aziz's tribe's mill. As we walked on a stony path, lined with thin stunted poplars, he told us two weeks before the enemy tribe had laid in wait along this road, and ambushed two fellows from Aziz's tribe, beating them up with sticks. I felt our pistol at my side. No ignorant rustic (a term I heard a local use in Gilgit once) would dare shake a stick at me.
But the enemy tribe was weak, Aziz said. Some of them were slaves, so they didn't have much heart to fight. And some of them had come over to Aziz's tribe's side. Some of the enemy tribe had made a compromise with Aziz's tribe. So that explained why Aziz's dog's name was Mr. Smyth. Aziz told me no foreigners had visited the village since before the days of Mr. Smyth.