A bear attacked a 41-year-old man from the village of Kurbinovo, near Resen, while he was picking mushrooms. It happened last night, around 19:50. The man was rushed to the clinical hospital in Bitola, where he received medical care. Police confirmed the incident through the Bitola precinct.

Another man-versus-bear encounter that ended in hospital. And once again in the same belt of the southwest, where the bear stopped being a once-in-a-lifetime sight a long time ago. Picking mushrooms in this region is becoming an activity with a risk nobody officially acknowledges.

The bear is a strictly protected species in Macedonia, which means responsibility for managing the population and the conflicts falls on the state, not on the man who happens to be in the wrong place in the forest. But where is that state when a Resen local ends up on the operating table? The question is not rhetorical for the people living under Pelister and Galicica.

Every summer the scenario repeats by the same script: attack, hospital, a brief statement, silence until the next time. There is no map of high-risk zones, no warning for the pickers, no system that would alert people when and where the bears are approaching the villages. And when the next attack comes, we will again read about one more „incident”.

For the man from Kurbinovo, for now, only one number matters - that he survived and made it to Bitola. The rest is the job of the institutions that have watched the problem grow for years, and react only with a statement after the fact.