Three or four days after the festival we hiked up to the village. It had been 28 years since the last time we had gone up together. We hiked casually along the new roadway about 3 hours, with bread & cheese in our kit. The descent on the Morinj side four days later would take 2½ hours, the rain that arrived making the descent quite treacherous. Up behind our house a massif named Bashtik stood 1500m above sea level—about 600m above the village itself. With age encroaching, of course, the climb was unlikely ever to be repeated. From the peak the prospect buffeted the brain, like the sudden wind did the body, knees ready to buckle and an odd fear of being lifted from the ground. On a clear day the Italian coast might be visible, they said. The old folk said when the wind was right the bells at San Pietro could be heard from the peak of Bashtik. Towns along the water were laid out as if na dlan, on the palm of the hand. Surprisingly, the village itself was completely out of view; instead the airport at Tivat uncannily appeared from the North. Wild swine was common now up at the heights. A few years previous a wolf had wrestled a rifle from one of our villagers, leaving tooth-marks on the barrel for proof. With the assistance of the vet from town, earlier at this man’s house we helped pull a calf from a cow. Thankfully, the largest animal sighted on Bashtik had been a mouse on the forest floor. The rocky folds of the land and then the levitation on the summit would knock in the brain like the good sense the schoolteachers of old had threatened.
Boka Kotorska, Montenegro
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