Close encounters on a bear mountain

Tara national park, Serbia The extraordinary thing is not how comfortable local people are around bears but how they live in almost parallel worlds

Sitting in a forest hut for three hours watching a glade fill with shadows tests to the limits all that modern life has made of us, especially our capacities for patience, stillness, silence.

Not that I expected the objects of our vigil to reciprocate. On the contrary, brown bears in this park can be 250kg, so I was assuming that they might give warning of their approach: inadvertent rustling perhaps, or anxious alarm calls from nearby birds. Not a bit of it: what was so affecting was how the bears brought the stillness with them. On one occasion an animal walked right by us and while just 4 metres away we heard nothing.