Gordon Wiltsie

Promberger-Fuerpass baits a lynx trap, part of a plan to attach a radio collar to the wild cat.

JUST BELOW THE high village of Magura, at the mouth of the small river valley draining from Fata lui Ilie and other peaks, sits a peculiar little town called Zarnesti. Narrow streets, paved with packed snow at this time of year, run between old-style Transylvanian row houses tucked behind tall courtyard walls closed with big wooden gates. Horse-drawn sleighs jingle by, carrying passengers on the occasional Sunday outing. Heavy horse carts with rubber tires haul sacks of corn, piles of fodder, and other freight. Young mothers pull toddlers and grocery bags on metal-frame sleds. There are also a few automobiles—mostly beat-up Romanian Dacias—creeping between the snowbanks, and along the south edge of town rises, with sudden ugliness, a cluster of five-story concrete apartment blocks from the Communist era, like a histogram charting the grim triumph of central planning. Beside the train tracks sits a large pulp mill that eats trees from the surrounding forests, digests them, and extrudes the result as paper and industrial cellulose.

You can walk all afternoon along the winding lanes of Zarnesti, down to the main street, past the Orthodox church, past the pulp mill, looping back through the post-office square, and not see a single neon sign. There are no restaurants and no hotels, none that I've managed to spot, anyway. Yet the population is 27,000. People live and work here, but few visit. For years Zarnesti was off-limits to travelers because of another industrial plant in town, the one commonly known as "the bicycle factory." The bicycle factory was really a munitions factory, built in 1938, when Romania was menaced by bellicose neighbors during the buildup toward World War II. Later, in the Communist era, it thrived and diversified. It produced artillery, mortars, rockets, treads for heavy equipment, boxcars, and—yes, as window dressing—a few Victoria bicycles. For decades it was Zarnesti's leading industry. But the market for Romanian-made rockets and mortars has been wan since the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, and the bicycle factory, which once employed 13,000 people, has laid off about 5,000 since 1989. At the pulp mill, likewise, the workforce has shrunk to a fraction of its former size. The town's economy now resembles a comatose patient on a gurney, ready to be wheeled who knows where. Still, Zarnesti is filled with stalwart people, and a few of those people are energized with new ideas and new hopes.

One new idea is large-carnivore ecotourism. It began in 1995, when Christoph Promberger was contacted by a British conservation group, working through a travel agency, that had heard about the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project and wanted to bring paying visitors to this remote corner of Europe for a chance to see wolves and bears. They came—not actually to Zarnesti, but to another small community nearby—and the money spent on lodging and food, though modest, was significant to the local economy. Two years later Christoph and his colleagues repeated the experiment as an independent venture. They welcomed eight different tour groups totaling some 70 people, who were accommodated in small pensiunes, vacation boardinghouses run by local families. By now the wolf fieldwork had come to focus on the wooded foothills and flats of the Barsa Valley, which stretches 30 miles into the mountains above Zarnesti. Although the likelihood of actually glimpsing a wolf or a brown bear in the wild is always low, even for experienced trackers like Marius and Peter, some nature-loving travelers were quite satisfied to hike or ride horses through Carpathian forests in which a sighting, or a set of tracks, was always possible. Large carnivores, it turned out, were attracting people who wouldn't come just for the edelweiss and primrose.

One of the pensiunes where the travelers stay is owned by Gigi Popa, a 46-year-old businessman whose trim mustache, balding crown, and gently solicitous manner conceal the soul of a risk-taker and a performer. Give him three shots of tsuica, a guitar, and an audience—he'll smile shyly, then hold the floor for an evening. Give him a window of economic opportunity—he'll climb through it. In the 1980s, Gigi worked as a cash-register repairman for a large, inefficient government enterprise charged with servicing machines all over Romania. The machines in question were mediocre at best and destined to be obsoletized by modern electronic versions. Gigi couldn't divine all the coming upheavals, but he could see clearly enough that mechanical Romanian cash registers were not a wave to ride into the future.

"After the revolution, I change quickly my job and my direction," Gigi says. He got out of cash-register repair and opened a small grocery and dry-goods store in the back of the house.

He was ready for the next step, not knowing what the next step might be, when Christoph told him about English, Swiss, and German travelers who would be coming to Zarnesti, drawn by the wolves in the mountains but needing lodging in town. Gigi promptly remodeled his home and his identity again. He became a pensiune-keeper, with four guest rooms ready the first summer and another four the following year. He now plays an important partnership role to the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project's program of tourism. Gigi's pensiune is where Gordon and I have been sleeping, for instance, when we're not sublimely geschtuck in the mountains.

One morning I ask Gigi the same question I asked Mosorel: Has the new order made life better or worse? "The good thing of the revolution is everybody can do what he have dreams," Gigi says. "Because everybody have dreams. And in Ceausescu time you can do no thing for your own. Must be on the same"—he makes a glass-ceiling gesture—"level. Everybody." Whereas now, he says, a person with initiative, wit, a few good ideas and a willingness to gamble on them can raise himself and his family above the dreary old limit. The bad thing, he says, is that free-market entrepreneurship involves far more personal stress than a government job in cash-register maintenance.