If you go down to the woods today...

Damien Enright visits the Tatra mountains in Slovakia

AS WE stumbled, seriously lost in the dense Slovakian forest, with dusk drawing down, I couldn’t stop thinking about the two Germans who were recently eaten by a bear.

It had happened only a couple of hundred miles to the east of us, in Romania. We were in the Tatra mountains, part of the Carpathian Alps spanning the Slovakia-Polish border, and that very afternoon I’d read that the local National Park was home to the westernmost population of brown bears in Europe, plus wolves, wildcats and snakes.

The guidebook said one was unlikely to see a bear because they stayed well away from waymarked paths. Thing was, we were also far away from waymarked paths. In fact, for the previous hour, we hadn’t been on a path at all and matters were getting worse — the evening was getting darker as my wife and I trod the untrodden ways we’d seen on a map and which, 10 minutes along, we realised hadn’t been walked for decades. But, ever optimistic, we thought it would open up around the next bend, that the stream we were following would join a small river which flowed through a hamlet; and we continued to believe this until we had stumbled, waded and skidded for an hour, with the forest growing ever thicker around us and the prospect, in the silent wilderness, of bears...

The Germans in Romania, two men, had simply stepped out of their car and were only a few hundred yards into the forest when the bear jumped them. Clearly, it enjoyed the meal. Bears know nothing about borders and the man-eater, having acquired a taste for EU citizens, might have migrated west through the pristine forest that extends from Romania to south Germany.

Bear-phobia and the thought of a bear behind mightily encourages fast walking. My wife usually moves at the smart clip of the Walking Women of Ireland, but she could barely keep up. We’d already encountered a hedgehog which just sat there and looked at us, clearly feeling the territory was its own and it wasn’t running away. The same psychology could well apply to the bears.

When we eventually stumbled out of the woods into a vast Alpine meadow, rain began to fall, but who cared a damn — we had escaped being eaten. Already sodden, we trudged through the tall, wet grasses of the meadow, drenched through to the underwear, tramping the last two miles to the guesthouse in the dying light.

The Tatra mountains are a natural paradise and everything is for half nothing in the off-season, as winter sports are the main tourist draw.

At our three-star ski-lodge pension in the beautiful Donovaly, evening meal with wine, giant breakfasts of ham, eggs, cheeses and jams, costs €60 for two. The lower Tatra is, in fact, better for walkers and nature-watchers than the very high mountains. The forest meadows are dense with wild flowers, the streams are crystal-clear. The weather is not cold, but liable to showers and thick, romantic mists descend over the tree-covered mountains in the evenings.

Driving the back roads of Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia, I’ve seen storks, yellowhammers and black redstarts and various eagles, unidentified but big. The fieldfares are magnificent in their full breeding plumage; we only see them in winter at home. At one road stop, there were large edible snails on the lawn but not on the menu.

And there was the lovely Slovakian hedgehog, which may have been sheltering babies beneath her, because she didn’t curl up or run. We didn’t disturb her, so we’ll never know.