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.

The most memorable sighting involved an immense dark shape materialising gently from beech foliage. It levered its bulk on to the side of a store, plucked its corncob snack and ghosted off into the green. It was almost like watching a silent movie, not just because it was soundless but also because the central character seemed to be from another time.

As much as I was excited by bears, their massive heads the size of my abdomen, it was the calmness of these encounters that I cherished. Equally telling were the words of a guide, Jarko, who said that in all his years, alone, unarmed in these mountains he has never once felt frightened.

Nor, it seems, have the many Serbians with homes at Tara. An issue here is the number of new houses that secure planning permission, which illustrates how many people are choosing to have summer retreats in the middle of bear country. Their remote properties, standing empty for long periods, will receive routine visits from the animals, given their free-roaming habits and the fact that there are 50 bears here.

The extraordinary thing is not just how comfortable local people are around bears, but how the two sets of residents live in almost parallel worlds. Perhaps this can reassure the Norfolk schoolchildren who, in projects organised by a friend to explore issues around possible lynx reintroduction in Thetford Forest, repeatedly emphasised their deep anxieties about a wild animal, weighing 20-30kg, that could pull down and eat deer.

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