Hunger is usually the spur.  The tribesmen who inhabit the Hunza gorge were notorious robbers till their recent conquest by the British.  Despite the most careful terrace tillage, their country was much overpopulated.  The supply of grain was so inadequate, that during the summer the people subsisted wholly on fruit, reserving the grain for winter use.  Therefore, when early summer opened the passes of the Karakorum and Himalayan ranges, and caravans began to move over the trade route between Kashmir and Yarkand, when the Kirghis nomads from the plains sought the pastures of the Pamir, the Hunza tribesmen found raiding caravans and herds, and pillaging the Gilgit Valley of Baltistan the easiest means of supplementing their slender resources.  Hardy mountaineers as they were, and born fighters, they always conducted their forays successfully, and returned to the shelter of their fastnesses, laden with plunder and driving their captive flocks before them.  The perpetual menace of these Hunza raids caused large districts in the Gilgit Valley to be abandoned by their inhabitants, and cultivated land to lapse into wilderness,[1365] while the Chilas to the south pillaged the Astor Valley of Baltistan, carrying away crops and cattle, enslaving women and children.[1366]

[Sidenote:  Cattle-lifting.]

Marauding propensities are marked among all retarded mountain peoples of modern times.  The cattle-lifting clans of the Scotch Highlands, who preyed upon the Lowlands, have their counterpart in the Pathans of the Suleiman and Baluch mountain border who, till curbed by the British power in India, systematically pillaged the plains of the Sind.[1367] The forest Bhils of the Vindhyan and Satpura ranges are scarcely yet married to agriculture; so when in time of drought their crops fail and the game abandons the hill forests to seek water in the lowland jungles, the Bhils cheerfully revert to their ancestral habit of cattle-lifting.[1368]

The Caucasus was long a breeding place for robber tribes who made their forays into the pastures and fields of southern Russia.  Robbery was part of the education of every Circassian prince, while one group of the Abassines conferred their chieftainship upon the most successful robber or the man of largest family.[1369] The Kurdish hillmen of the Armenian ranges descend with their herds of horses in winter to the warmer plains, where they exhaust the pastures and subject the Armenian villages to a regular system of blackmail.[1370] The wide grassy plains about Koukou Nor Lake, near the Chinese border of Tibet, attract numerous Mongol nomads with their herds; but these rich pastures are exposed to the depredation of Si Fan brigand tribes, who have their haunts in the deep, impenetrable gorges of the neighboring mountains, and carefully guard all the approaches to the same.  They are Buddhists, but worship a special Divinity of Brigandage, to whom their lamas offer prayers for the success of every foray.[1371] Hence, among mountain as among desert peoples, robbery tends to become a virtue; environment dictates their ethical code.