KARS, Turkey — “WE have enemies.”

The old Kurdish woman said this by way of running me off. I had trekked into her mountain hamlet at dusk, hoping to camp nearby. She waved a hand at the stone homes around us. Most were empty. There had been a killing between neighbors. The house of the perpetrator had been leveled. Fearing retribution, his relatives had run for their lives. Armed members of the victim’s family were now guarding the place against their return. The watchmen’s lonesome campfire seesawed in the wind high up on a cliff.

“It’s not safe here,” the woman apologized. So I walked on. I slept five miles away in a field.

We have enemies. Over the past three months, while plodding some 350 miles along the steppe trails, rural back roads and modern highways of Turkey’s Kurdish heartland, I’ve heard this bleak refrain dozens of times. I am crossing the world on foot as part of a project called the “Out of Eden Walk.” The idea involves retracing the first human migration out of Africa during the Stone Age, and reporting current events at the micro level along the ancestral route to South America. Turkey, the eighth country on my itinerary since leaving Ethiopia in early 2013, was supposed to be easy. But while plodding into eastern Anatolia this summer, I have been shooed out of Kurdish villages, interrogated by Kurdish vigilantes and nearly shot twice by frightened Kurds. None of this is personal, of course.

Friendlessness — having enemies — is synonymous with Kurdishness.

The world’s 30 million Kurds, a tough and independent mountain people who mostly practice a moderate brand of Sunni Islam, are scattered among Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran — states that for generations have perfected the tools of marginalization, counterinsurgency and manipulation to keep their unruly Kurdish minorities in check. Lately, American military support for Kurds battling the Islamic State in Syria has revived a modest dream of pan-Kurdish unity: greater cooperation among the region’s rival Kurdish movements, if not the dawn of a Greater Kurdistan.

Yet my boot-level view of Kurdish fractiousness suggests how steep that slope may be. To be clear: I have been overwhelmed by a stunning brand of Kurdish hospitality that places nearly every private home and barn at my disposal. (I am walking with a cargo mule.) But this kindness frequently comes entangled in a painful thicket of grievance and suspicion — not just among individual Kurds, but entire villages and families. Walking through a still-mythic Kurdistan must resemble, I imagine, a foot journey through 19th-century Appalachia: Kurds appear to share the same violent honor culture and clannish tensions as the frontier Scotch-Irish. Any ramble in the woods can be fraught.