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.