During an afternoon hunt, I’d followed my customary practice and stashed my bike in some brush. With just a few minutes of daylight left, I saw a coyote approaching over my right shoulder, just trotting along at first. Suddenly it crossed the path that my bike’s doe-urine-anointed tires had rolled down as I rode in. Immediately picking up the olfactory cue, it crouched low to ground and began belly-crawling towards my bike, stopping to sniff each spot of deer scent left by the rubber. It stalked right up to the brushpile, and I believe that it fully expected to see a young doe bedded there.

After crouching and sniffing for several minutes, the songdog finally stood up and walked into the brush. It carefully inspected the bike, looked around the area, and then jogged off.

TRICKING IT OUT
The first step in building the ultimate hunting machine is picking out the bike. Personally, I didn’t want to invest a lot of money. A more passionate cyclist might criticize me on that point, arguing that you get what you pay for, and in retrospect, I might be inclined to agree with that view, as the model that I chose has required several repairs and upgrades over the past few years.

But my rationale for going cheap was that I knew from the onset of this project that my bike would be used for one purpose only: hunting. General abuse -- crossing creeks and being tossed over barbed-wire fences, hidden in brushpiles and left outside for months at a time -- was going to be the rule for this bike; it wouldn’t hang by hooks in the garage for very long.

The first order of business: Lose all the shine. After removing all the decals, I lightly sanded the finish and wiped the bike down thoroughly with acetone; then, every surface from which light could reflect was covered with olive-drab spray paint. My ride looked cooler already.

I continued the camouflaging process with adhesive vinyl in a popular camo pattern that a local sign company was able to order for me. The same material sometimes used to cover golf carts and panels on vehicles so I knew it would be sturdy. Applying it was more time-consuming than I’d anticipated, but in a few hours, the entire frame and several other parts were completely covered. (One tip: Putting the tape on in small pieces works much better than does trying to cover the whole thing at once. The small pieces blend together so well that everyone who’s seen the bike assumes that it was film-dipped.) The vinyl applied, I finished by breaking the remaining olive drab areas up with flat gray, tan, brown and black spray paint.

After three years of rough use, the vinyl covering has held up surprisingly well, marred only by a few predictable chips and scuffs, and the olive drab base coat continues to prevent any glare or reflections.

The next step: Accessorize the bike for hunting. My primary goal was to customize a bike that I could use to carry my bow and, perhaps, a small pack into the woods. (The design I eventually came up with works for rifle hunters, too.)

My first idea was to devise a means of carrying the bow across the handlebars somehow, but they were too narrow, and the handbrakes were in the way, so that proved impractical. The handlebars would have to serve another purpose. A visit to a local bike shop produced a large handlebar-mounted basket; perfect for carrying my backpack or other bulky items, it removes easily when not needed. A fanny pack fastened to the handlebars is another good option for carrying smaller items.