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the open would not normally concern me, but my research showed that Princip’s route touched on territory that was vukojebina in both the literal and figurative sense. The mountain region I would have to cross supports a significant population of wolves. I checked with local environmental groups and they assured me there had only ever been one confirmed case of a human being attacked by a wolf in Bosnia and that was because the animal was infected with rabies. I could be confident that, if I bumped into a wolf, it would most likely view me as a hunter and run away. Bears, they told me, were another story.
    Bears continue to live in the mountains that I was planning to pass through, and the forests surrounding the town of Bugojno, where Princip caught his first train, have long been famous for bear-hunting. The closest I got to a bear in the 1990s was in Bugojno, when I covered fierce fighting for the town between Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim forces. As the Bosnian Croats prepared to pull back they set about torching an old mountain lodge used by Tito, himself a great fan of bear-hunting. Before they left, one of the militiamen ran inside and came back out with the trophy skin of a large bear pegged out on a huge wooden board, signed by the communist dictator himself. The gunman offered it as a gift to bemused British officers attached to the United Nations peacekeeping force, and the skin remains to this day in the proud possession of the officers’ mess of 1st Battalion the Yorkshire Regiment. Not to miss out, the squaddies were presented at the same time with a stuffed bear cub that is still to be found in the sergeants’ mess.
    Again I made contact with local environmental specialists and they assured me there had been only a handful of instances in the region when people had been attacked by bears. I was told that all would be fine, as long as I made sure I never found myself between mother bear and cubs.
    But there was one other risk that I did not want to underestimate, one that is particularly serious in Bosnia – landmines and unexploded munitions left over from the 1990s. Mines were laid by all sides then, making Bosnia one of the most mine-contaminated countries in the world. Attempts have been made to identify areas of high risk and efforts begun to clear some areas, but in spite of this around a dozen people are killed each year by wartime mines and munitions. I got in touch with the de-mining authorities in Sarajevo, who explained that it was only cost-effective to clear areas likely to be used by people. If mines were found in remoter, wilder spots, they were simply marked with warning signs and recorded on maps.
    When I told the de-miners the details of my route, they sent me sheet after sheet from their map database, all as large digital files attached to an email. I clicked on the attachments and watched eagerly as the images slowly opened on the screen of my laptop, looking out for place names and features that I knew to be on Princip’s route. The challenge then became to find a safe passage through the squiggly Richthofen-red loops that the experts used to mark the minefields. On the very first sheet a series of minefields was marked in the valley where Princip was born. The map for Bugojno was the most worrying, with an almost unbroken braid of black and red reaching from top to bottom of the entire page, right across the route I hoped to follow.
    I spoke to the experts and to several climbers and hikers from Bosnia. They all had the same advice: away from the old frontlines it would be safe to hike in open country, but when approaching old frontline positions I should be sure to stick to tracks or paths that showed the visible signs of being used by people or animals.
    As I became engrossed in my research I realised that under my feet at my desk in Cape Town was a much-loved kilim, one that I had not really thought about in years – a large, hard-wearing piece with the repetitive fractal design