The Trigger (12 page)

Fun though it is to walk with companions, I still find there are times when it is satisfying to go by oneself, following one’s own pace, and nobody else’s. My legs felt strong as I climbed for that hour or so, the clouds playing games with me, coming and going on the wind, promising wonderful views one second, then shutting them away the next. Sadly, by the time I reached the trig point marking the summit at 6,100 feet, all around me was a mucky grey. I might as well have been stumbling around at sea-level in a foggy quarry.

A wind shelter had been built out of rocks around the trig point and, tucked amongst them, I found a notebook where climbers logged their achievement in reaching the top of Mount Šator. I took the book out and saw its earliest entry was dated 2004, and was curious that it might have taken so long for the first recreational climber to reach here after the war ended in 1995. I thumbed through to the most recent entry, already almost two years old, adding my own message: ‘British author in search of Princip’s ghost – safe travels.’

Comfortably out of the wind, I snacked and took a long drink from my water bottle, hoping the cloud would lift. No luck, so after a rest I picked up my gear and headed down again to begin my search for Arnie. Within twenty minutes the cloud rose once and for all, revealing a scene that reminded me of cherished holidays in Scotland as a teenager. The southern summit flank of Mount Šator was one huge great moor, a rolling, treeless expanse of tundra-like tussock, yellowed in places by flowering patches of small plants that could double perfectly for Scottish gorse. In contrast to the previous day’s low alpine terrain, this was a starker, treeless zone reaching in a south-easterly direction for many open miles, before coming up against another slab of thick Bosnian forest stretching to the horizon.

It proved easy enough to reconnect with Arnie on the main track, although he was full of apology for turning up a little later than planned. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ he grovelled when he came into view. ‘Milan got talking. And then he made coffee. Serbian coffee, of course. And then he offered me his own-brew plum brandy, in which he soaks fresh mint leaves. It would have been rude to say no. I don’t normally like plum brandy, but his was really special.’

No apology was needed. We had plenty of time, the sun was now shining and we were back together on Princip’s trail, hiking over terrain that felt more and more familiar. Larks exploded noisily upwards in alarm from either side of the winding track, and all around was the same barrenness I remembered from hiking in Argyll. It looked so much like the Highlands I would not have been surprised to come across a gaggle of British ramblers or a shooting party in tweed banging away at grouse. But as the track finally reached the trees once more, we found evidence of a very different type of shooting activity.

Soil had been piled up to make breastworks to protect artillery positions. Prefabricated concrete doorways were set into a series of defensive underground bunkers. All around lay wooden pallets, the sort of thing you see in factories and round the back of supermarkets where the delivery trucks go. They seemed so banal, so civilian, so out of context in a war zone. But then again, what better way was there to deliver heavy items, whether they are sacks of flour or high-explosive 120mm artillery shells?

‘Don’t go in there,’ Arnie said with a firmness I had not previously heard in him. I had approached one of the bunker entrances, but his words stopped me. ‘These are positions dating from Operation Storm. Milan warned me to look out for them next to the path. They were built by the Croat army and there is no telling if there is unexploded ordnance still in there.’

I took his advice, viewing the scene instead from the security of the beaten track. Over the intervening years long grass had grown over the earthworks, and the timber of the pallets was bleached pale with age. In August 1995 Croat forces would have valued the high ground around Mount Šator, commanding as it does the valley of Glamoč over to the east. This would have made a fine position in which to dig in artillery, supporting Croat forces working their way deeper into Bosnia. Those would have been summer days and the gunners would have enjoyed the same scene as us: the edge of a high mountain moor, under a blue sky, with a nearby beech forest offering restful shade.

For the next few hours Arnie and I prattled away happily as we made good progress under the cover of trees along a jeep trail that had clearly not been used for a long while. Branches overhung the track so thickly it was reduced in places to a footpath for a single person, and the gravel where tyres once ran was covered with a filigree of moss. My de-mining map showed a minefield on the right-hand side of the track, perhaps a defensive position to protect the approach to the gunnery position back up on the moor. This might once have been a recreational area for hikers, but it was clear that today it was rarely used. Perhaps the meagre record in the logbook at the top of Mount Šator indeed comprised the full picture of who had climbed in this area these past years. We were yet to meet anyone on the trail, even though the terrain was as beautiful as any I have ever enjoyed for hiking.

The thought of food and drink is a stalwart motivator for long hikes, so Arnie went off on a riff about what he would most like to have, if we made it to Glamoč that evening. The map suggested we still had about fifteen miles to go, and although it was now well after midday I was relaxed as the various landmarks we were passing suggested that we were making steady progress. At a break in the forest we passed a mountain meadow of such size it warranted a reference on the map: Medjugorje, a name that translates as ‘between the mountains’. With my children I had recently and repeatedly sat through one of their favourite stories, Heidi. Medjugorje could have doubled nicely for one of the high alpine pastures where the goatherd had lived with her grandfather.

The track continued on and on through the forest, all the time making an almost indiscernible descent. As the hours passed Arnie’s blisters started to trouble him and I heard him grumbling about his footwear. ‘Bloody boots! What was I thinking, buying shit like this? They are good for strutting around Shoreditch, nothing more. I’ve only used them for a day or two and the soles are already shredded to nothing.’

There comes a time on a trek when it’s best just to let it all out, so I eased off the commiseration and let Arnie get on with it. We rested every hour or so, and after a while the forested terrain began to feel very same-ish, the trees crowded so thickly that it was difficult to spot any landmarks as reference points. We were deep in the forest, on an old jeep track, and the compass alone was telling us that we were heading in the right direction for Glamoč. There were no indicators of progress except for the passing of the hours, no sign of any local people we could ask to check we really were on the right path. Arnie’s morale was beginning to dip, his footfall now painful to watch as he shifted his weight all the time to try and protect those worsening blisters. He started complaining about the tepid water in our bottles.

‘I could really do with a fresh, cold drink,’ he said at one point. ‘Anything but this shit!’

And then, from around the corner, without any forewarning, came a silver jeep. The forest had muffled the sound of its approach, and the driver was as surprised to see us as we him. The vehicle slewed to a halt in a modest cascade of gravel and he gave us a cheery greeting, nonchalantly handing over two large bottles of water, so newly taken from a fridge that they still had condensation on the outside.

‘You see, out in the remote areas of Bosnia there is magic at work,’ said Arnie. ‘The first guy we see on the trail in two days, and what does he have for us? Ice-cold water. Magic, I tell you.’ He was smiling now, his cheerfulness restored, and so carefree in his drinking that spilled water gushed down his chin. But then he looked at me out of the corner of his eye, with a flash of seriousness about the power of the supernatural in Bosnia.

As evening approached we finally reached the edge of the forest, with the Glamoč valley opening up beneath us as wide and green as the plain around Obljaj back over on the other side of the Šator massif. I was grateful for the gentle breeze that now reached us and we paused to breathe deep, enjoying what appeared on the surface to be another paradisical agricultural tableau. In peaceful times Glamoč, now visible just a few miles to the south, was known as ‘potato town’ for the large-scale cultivation and processing of that vegetable. But from our viewpoint, looking out over the plain, something jarred. Many of the houses dotting the landscape were in ruins – roofless, their walls blackened from fire, their gardens overgrown through abandonment.

The track descended sharply and, as we came around a hairpin bend, we found ourselves at a modest roadblock. It was manned by an elderly figure sitting outside one of those shipping containers that are used to move goods all round the world. On this Bosnian hillside it served as a hut. His name was Zaim and he too was enjoying the late-afternoon cool, his seat facing down the slope towards the approach road climbing up from the valley floor. The sound of our sticks striking the ground caught his attention and he looked round over his shoulder, surprised.

‘I don’t often get people walking from out of the forest like you,’ he said cheerfully. He raised his eyebrows when he heard we had walked all the way from Mount Šator and then offered to give us a ride into town at the end of his shift. There were still about four miles to go and, while Arnie was willing to accept his offer, I preferred to keep going.

‘Why do you have the checkpoint anyway?’ I asked.

‘It’s to do with the logging. You need a licence to cut timber up in the mountains, but some people try to do it without paying for the licence. I am employed by the local council to check that the loggers have the proper paperwork.’

I smiled. During the war checkpoints were a monumental pain, manned by militia who took routine pleasure in blocking foreign reporters – an irksome feature of life, as you could easily fritter away whole days negotiating your way through. It felt like progress to come across a checkpoint set up for sound environmental reasons. As I prepared to set off I caught sight of a Union Jack stencilled on the side of the container, an unexpected sight in rural Bosnia.

‘The container belonged to British forces when they were based down in the valley after the war ended in 1995,’ Zaim said. ‘They left it when they eventually pulled out a few years back, and it was donated to Glamoč town council. Nice guys, mostly, the British soldiers. I had a job for years cooking for them in the officers’ mess. Nobody eats finer than the British soldier!’

His words stayed with me as I set off for those last few miles into Glamoč, a town big enough to promise a restaurant where we could enjoy a good meal. After a day of ferocious heat, louring clouds promised a summer storm and accelerated the onset of dusk. I left Arnie to wait for his lift and had only my thoughts for company as the sky darkened and the gravel track morphed first into a tarmac lane, then into a main road with painted lines and a hard shoulder. It was Saturday evening, but traffic was scarce. The storm was yet to hit, the air growing steadily more charged. In a hillside pasture three men lay next to scythes on turf freshly shorn, smoking cigarettes and talking next to ricks newly constructed. I raised my hand in greeting, but they looked through me without response. Half a mile later four large tornjak dogs erupted from slumber, charging towards me, a barking blur of fangs and saliva. By reflex I tensed, but thankfully the farm compound had a fence.

Another mile later and I began to hear the intermittent thwack of wood being hewn. A pile of tree-trunk sections had been dumped in the front garden of a modest-looking home and four people were busy splitting them into pieces of firewood, which were then being carefully stacked under cover in readiness for the winter. Again I waved, again no answer. The person wielding the axe was a woman, in her sixties perhaps, her scrawny, tanned arms showing puffs of white skin as her dress rode up near the shoulder with each firm downward cleave. It brought to my mind a traumatic moment in 1993, when the driver of an aid convoy in central Bosnia had been attacked by local Croat farmers armed with agricultural tools, incensed at what they perceived to be help going to their enemies. The man was eventually finished off by a farmer’s wife wielding a pitchfork.

The reaction to me, a stranger arriving in town, was at the hostile end of indifference. I felt sure Princip and his father would have met the same response as they passed through towns like this on their trek. Outsiders were to be treated with suspicion, potential threats to the status quo – a characteristic captured memorably by the writer Ivo Andrić. In his novel The Days of the Consuls Andrić’s fictional description of Westerners passing through the central Bosnian town of Travnik has, for me, more than a whiff of authenticity to it:

Then as soon as they reached the first Turkish houses they began to hear curious sounds: people calling to one another, slamming their courtyard gates and the shutters of their windows. At the very first doorway, a small girl opened one of the double gates a crack and, muttering some incomprehensible words, began spitting rapidly into the street, as though she were laying a curse on them … No one ceased working or smoking or raised his eyes to honour the unusual figure and his splendid retinue with so much as a glance. Here and there a shopkeeper turned his head away, as though searching for goods on the shelves.

On the edge of Glamoč I walked into a garage to buy a cold drink and the man at the till asked me where I had walked from that day. When I told him, he broke into the florid vernacular of the British soldier. ‘No fucking way!’ he said in perfect squaddie English as he handed me my change. The British army’s impact on local Glamoč society clearly went beyond the donation of a few old shipping containers.

The sound of a car driving along the hard shoulder had me glancing anxiously behind me. Did local unfriendliness extend to running over strangers? But it was only Zaim slowing down, with Arnie grinning from the passenger seat and saying he would go into the town centre and find us a place to eat. By now I was done in, past caring for a meal that was more appealing in anticipation than in reality. After wolfing down veal accompanied by a sample portion of Glamoč’s famous potatoes – starchy, wholesome and tasty – all I wanted was a bed.