He was alone, slumped in his lawnchair when I found him, hooves askew, so deep in beer sleep that not even his smouldering hair could disturb his slumber.
"Wake up, Buck," I said. "You're burning." Some prankster had stuck marshmallows on the prongs of his antlers, tipped him over the campfire.
He came to with a start, melted white goo flying across the campsite, splatting onto the gas-powered generator, the big-screen TV and the satellite dish projecting from his RV. "I smell burnt toast. Am I having a stroke?"
"No," I replied. "You're having a vacation."
"Right," he remembered. "Getting back to my roots." That was the phrase he used when planning this trip. We had been watching the Discovery Channel (the porn network, he calls it) when he got all wistful over a documentary on wilderness deer.
"My people!" he declared with such fervour that I refrained from reminding him that his people weren't actually human. Urban deer like Buck, more at home in suburbia than the salal, tend to forget who they are. Maybe that's why he was so hell bent on wading into the woods.
I shook my head. A deer in the forest. Might as well wear a Canucks jersey in Boston. "Aren't you afraid of getting shot?"
He laughed. "Nobody hunts anymore."
Not quite true. There were 95,000 hunters in sa国际传媒 last year, up from 81,000 in 2003, but still down from the 165,000 who stalked the woods in funny orange hats in 1980.
Don't see as many people fishing, either. Statistics sa国际传媒 says the number of anglers fell 25 per cent between 1995 and 2005. Those who did cast a line were aging; the average male was 48, the average female 44.
Provincial park campgrounds recorded 2.5 million visits to in 2009-10, down from 3.4 million 20 years earlier. Plenty of people go to private sites, too, but is it really camping when you can drive in on paved roads and set up your tent in a sea of humanity resembling Woodstock without the brown acid? Can't remember Lord Baden-Powell writing anything in the Boy Scout manual about Coleman rechargeable blenders, portable music players or solar-powered cellphone chargers. It's not really a wilderness experience if you need to bring a wallet.
The question is: Have Canadians lost the outdoor gene?
With 80 per cent of us now living as urban animals, are we more plugged into our iWhatevers than the natural world? "A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe," Pierre Berton once wrote. Now we don't even know the J stroke.
Not long ago this was a nation of pioneers, selfreliant, resourceful, the kind of people who wouldn't starve to death if Thrifty's closed.
"Very good 'cowboy' manner," summarized a German intelligence assessment of Canadian troops in 1944, while another lamented our soldiers' superiority at Indianerkrieg - Indian war, or fieldcraft.
Perhaps it was that wartime experience that made that generation so eager to explore the forests once home. My own dad loved camping, would beam like a Rotarian on Ecstasy, cheerfully whistling The Happy Wanderer while merrily feeding us bully beef on hardtack - spit on a shingle, the soldiers called it, though they didn't say spit - as the lashing rain turned our Saltspring Island paradise into Passchendaele circa 1917. Having spent much of the 1940s tenting through Europe, he considered any outdoor expedition in which he was not actually shot at to be a roaring success.
Not that gunfire is out of the question in the Canadian woods. Nor is getting blasted.
"Real hunters don't drink beer," an oldtimer once told me.
"Right," I said, "that would be irresponsible...."
"It's too heavy to pack in the bush," he continued.
"Better to pour Tang powder into a bottle of vodka. We call it Orangutang." A blazing fire, hard liquor and high-powered rifles. What could go wrong?
This, too often, is the real Canadian outdoor experience, the word "camping" being confused with "getting drunk and passing out in a grizzly den."
"Ah, the great outdoors," said Buck, sipping on a beer, staring across the campfire at the Discovery Channel show on the RV's television.
