‘I know this bear. He knows me. We’ve met several times.” Our guide for the day points to a damaged sign in Sutjeska national park, at the beginning of the trail that descends to the forest of Perućica in south-east Bosnia. The wooden post is covered in scratches from large claws. “Bears are the sharks of the land, because they have the keenest sense of smell on the mountain. They are highly intelligent. I’m deeply persuaded that they know who is a friend and who is a foe. I come often to the forest, so this guy knows my smell. But there was one incident, a hunter who came here to kill, and a bear peeled off his face like an orange.”
With that image, Dejan Elez commands our full attention. A Bosnian Serb law graduate turned ranger and now mountain guide, he is a born storyteller and raconteur. My travel companion, Chris, and I are rapt as he describes the famous battle that was fought near here, when Yugoslav partisans broke through a German encirclement in 1943, taking the Wehrmacht by surprise under cover of a violent storm – “the wind was rising and the lightning was like a strobe” – but after that, Dejan’s narrative leads much further back in time, into the depths of one of Europe’s most ancient forests.
