1.

As we came over the mountain we could see the storm clouds gathering in the distant hills, dark and ominous looking. Attila was angry. "Hell," he said.

"Why are you angry?" I asked.

"Maybe we don't see the bear."

I'd met Attila a few days before. He's this wiry, wired-up, fiery character, with a concave chest, with jet-black hair and pale, shrewd, intense eyes, always in a sort of fury of activity. He swears a lot. When he got out of the car he was clutching a beer. He shook my hand and said, "excuse me this beer. Yesterday was holiday in Romania, but I have to work, so today I will have my holiday instead. That is why I am drinking beer."

Later he admitted that it was because he was nervous about having to speak English with me. He speaks good English, very correct. "Oxford English." But this is part of the problem, that he is intensely aware when he makes a mistake, when his grammar is not up to his own high standards. This was why he was nervous. He felt the beer would make it easier to communicate.

He had Huni and Szabi with him, the cameraman and the guide. They were all in their twenties, henceforward to be known as "the boys".

Attila said, "I hope you don't mind it that we are so young."

"Why would I mind that?" I asked. "As long as you show me the bears I don't care how old you are."

Huni is muscular and handsome, with sparkling eyes and a cool, relaxed, self-aware presence. He is obviously very comfortable in his own skin. Szabi is tall and dark, with a hooked nose like a bird of prey and a sense of the wild about him. He was the guide. It was he who would be taking us into the forest later to see the bears.

We met in a car park in Baile Tusnad. Then we went to a restaurant and ate. We drank some beer. It was very relaxed. We talked about the Aves Foundation, their organisation. We talked about the problems with the bear in Romania. We talked about the wildlife in general. They showed me copies of the magazine they produce. I took to them all immediately. My face still bore the scars of a party the night before, when I'd tripped-up and fallen over in the dark. I had these red, angry-looking scabs all across my forehead. In the restaurant I pointed it out (although it was obvious). "Palinka," I said. Attila said that Huni had said it was the first thing he had noticed about me when he had got out of the car, and that he had said the same thing. "Palinka," he'd said. "This man likes to drink." And they'd all decided they liked me too.

Afterwards we drove to the far side of the city of Brasov to a bear sanctuary called Libearty near the village of Zarnesti. It was full of bears that had been in captivity, in zoos or in cages. The bears were in compounds behind fences, but out in the open, in a forest.

Attila said, "these are not real bears. They are more like dogs. You will see when you get there."

At one point he was struggling for a word. "This is not good for the bear... the bear..."

He was trying to find a word to describe the family of bears as a whole, frustrated at his lack of English.

He said: "This is not good for the bear nation. That is not the right word. The bear nation. What is the right word please?"

I said, "I think you mean species, but, I tell you what, I like ‘bear nation' better."

We drove up a steep gravel track on a hillside over looking some spectacular mountain scenery till we came at last to the gate. There was a snow-capped mountain hovering in the distance. The gate was a tree branch strung across the road. Then we parked.

Huni had his camera out and was filming everything.

Attila got out and went to talk to the uniformed wardens inside the sanctuary, after which he ushered us in through the gate.

There was a gravel path between high link fences, behind which was an electric wire. We were in the forest by now, albeit one fenced off into compounds. Even so there is a particular sound associated with the forest. A kind of hush. A whispered ripple of wind through the leaves. Your voice takes on a certain quality. A kind of muffling of the sound, a dampening, as if the forest is drawing close around you, as if it is wrapping you in its presence.

Suddenly Attila said, "there is a bear!"

It was walking on all fours with its back to us, maybe thirty feet away in the forest, this slow, ambling walk, rolling its shoulders. It was my first sight of a bear. It was ignoring us, looking casually indifferent.

We came to another compound on the left and there was another bear, only much nearer. Attila made a clucking noise and it turned and came to the fence. So now it was barely three feet away, this huge, dark creature with a wet black nose and claws.

"See," said Attila, "I told you they were not real bears."

It looked like a real bear to me.

We carried on walking. We passed another compound, this time on the right, and there was a medium-sized bear inside.

Attila said, "so this is the last chance for bears." He said, "it's not a bad thing for a bear in captivity to live here, but it's the last chance."

The bear had tan coloured fur on its back and was strolling up and down near the fence. It had a cleft-palate.

Attila said, "that's Lydia."

"Lydia?"

"She is another female. And that one there is Christian."

I looked and there was another very large bear behind.

"He is a real big bear," continued Attila. "But you can see like dogs they are coming here. That is the difference."

Szabi said: "That's a bear!"

"Christian?"

I couldn't get over the fact that these bears had names, and, what's worse, that one of them had the name of the character out of Pilgrim's Progress.

I took it for an omen.

"He is about 400 kilos," continued Attila. "So that's a bear. And they are very good friends. He spends together winter, Christian and Lydia, and, you know, I know all these bears. When Lydia came here she was psychologically absolutely down, was moving like that, like that, like that" - miming a distressed bear stepping backwards and forwards on the spot - "and now you can see, no problems..."

But Christian was huge, a great hulking thing, twice as big as a man, at least ten feet tall, maybe more, though it was hard to say as he was on all fours. But he had broad shoulders and a rippling, muscular back, and you wouldn't want to meet him if he was in a rage. He could tear you to shreds. He could kill you with a single blow.

"How old is he?" I asked.

"It's about 24 years old," said Attila, and he lives about 40 years. So it's like a 40 years old man. So it's in the best time. On the top, on the top. The strongest bear. And you know, if you shoot a bear like this as a hunter you pay about 10 or 15,000 EU. If you shoot a bear like Lydia you pay about 7,000."

"That's a bear," said Szabi. "It's needed in the nature. The number is very low, just, I think, maybe about 20, 50 bear. Could be about 30, 40."

He was referring to the fact that fully mature adults like Christian are a rarity in the wild, precisely because they are the greatest prizes: the biggest and most dangerous, the most impressive as trophies.

"This is the problem that I told you about, that the most part of the big bears are hunted, are killed, and this is the problem. It's good if we have got a little bit more bears, but I don't think it's true. But it's good if we have got a little bit more, but we have to select them, not just to kill the biggest."

"What I was say," said Szabi, "we could reintroduce in other parts that bears..."

"He's absolutely fantastic," I said. "Christian, you say his name is? Why do they call him Christian?"

"He is from the circus in Bucharest, and they gave him that name," said Attila.

It was after this that I first heard a bear speak. It was Lydia. She was walking up and down by the fence making this noise. It is a unique and unmistakable sound, like a plaintive nasal cry, slightly wistful, slightly melancholic. The Latin name for bear is "Urs" and that is exactly the sound they make. "Ur?" It's a question. There's a questioning tone to it, like something you might ask of the mountains, of the wind. Something slightly sad. "Why have you left me, Ur? Where have you gone, Ur? Why do all us creatures have to die?" You can hear the peaks of the mountains in its voice. You can hear the breathing nearness of the wind. You can hear the echoes of the forest. You can hear the lonely miles of travel. You can hear mortality and loss.

We carried on walking. Attila said that it was a pity we couldn't see bears in the trees. "Now is too cold," he said. "When it's warmer they are climbing the trees and playing in the wind to cool down," he said.

It was like fate. No sooner had he said this than we turned a corner and there was a bear in a tree. It was kind of perched there, lodged in the branches halfway up a tree, it's forelegs jammed into the v of some small braches, it's back legs wrapped around the trunk, holding on with its claws. It was swaying in the wind, this incongruously heavy creature on a thin stalk of a tree, like a great fat cat with a black nose. Did I see contentment in its face? Probably not. But I saw a bear in its natural environment, halfway up a tree, kind of rubbing itself up and down against the bark.

It was growling at another bear which was prowling around on the ground below. Szabi said, "it was probably say something like, ‘go away'."

Attila said, "I don't agree." The boys started talking in Hungarian, and then they were laughing.

Attila translated for me.

"We was talking about the bears sexual habits. I was saying it was not ‘go away', it was something like ‘what are you doing there? Why don't you come here?'"

You may have noticed by now that Huni never speaks. Attila speaks, and Szabi speaks, but Huni never does. That's not because he can't speak English. His English is as good as anyone's. It's because he's filming, non-stop. Everywhere I go I have this camera pointing at me, at my face, at my back. Or he's filming from behind, as we walk. Or he's filming each of us as we talk, first Attila, then me. Or he's filming the bears as we look at them.

So now he came up very close and was focussing on my face. I was obviously looking delighted at the sight of a bear up a tree, which must have made an interesting picture. But I was slightly annoyed. "Not at me," I said, putting my hands up to cover my face. "At the bears."

"Ignore him," said Attila. "He's working."

Huni said, "I film you. I film the bears later."

It was only at this point that it occurred to me that they wanted to put me on TV.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Bear-Nation-Looking-For-Bear-in-Harghita-County--Transylvania---Part-2