At its basics, turkey hunting is not fair.

You pretend to be a hen, eager to breed, build up the gobbler's hopes, and then shoot him. And what we're doing isn't natural, because in the turkey world, the hen goes to the tom. I always make the male call twice before I answer, and that's a technique that works with turkeys too.One spring my friend Tom suggested a new tactic. We would ride mountain bikes along a power line, stopping to call periodically. Neither of us had a mountain bike, but we didn't let that stop us. In hindsight I should have borrowed mine from someone a lot taller, and should have kept searching until I found one that didn't have the "My Little Pony" logo on the side.Tom watched in a slack-mouthed stare as I unloaded the blue bike with its handlebar streamers. It had a big white basket - it had been a selling point for me - and into that I loaded my inflatable decoys and backpack, strapping my shotgun across the handlebars. I slipped on a headlamp and smiled at Tom, in what I hoped was a confident manner - I hadn't actually done any sort of test ride. "Let's go," I said, pushed off, and proceeded to ride the bike just a short, wildly swerving distance down the power line and then over an embankment.But here's the thing - I was really squeezing the handbrakes, and they were squealing. And every time the brakes squealed, turkeys gobbled. Tom quickly joined me at the bottom of the embankment. "Get the decoys," he hissed, and then stood speechless as I started to blow them up.The turkeys gobbled enthusiastically all around us. Tom tried to pull me into cover as I frantically continued to blow into the decoys. I remembered thinking smugly at the cash register, a few weeks prior, "What turkey wouldn't want his own blow up doll?"In practical application, trying to blow up the inflatable decoys under the pressure of numerous turkey gobbles while being dragged through the dark woods affected me like putting my chin on a baseball bat and spinning in circles at a summer picnic.Tom let go of me, and I lurched sideways through the woods, smashing through brush and banging off trees until I collapsed at the base of a tree. The dark band of the horizon tilted and spun, and when the turkeys flew down Tom shot one. There were gobblers all around us but I couldn't shoot, since my shotgun was still on the bike.On the final Saturday of that season, I had a single hen decoy set up in a secluded corner of a newly planted field. As the morning sky blazed red at the horizon, I saw a tom turkey strutting silently, just over the crest of the field. I called, and he immediately gobbled, and then appeared over the crest, still strutting. For a few happy moments, I was thinking, today's the day.Then, like a torpedo, a hen turkey was running across the field towards the turkey - my turkey - looking for all the world like a Confederate woman holding up her skirts and running pell mell down a dirt road to her man, home after four years in the Civil War. I decided I hated her. The hen and her new friend slipped away into the red dawn in a practically Hollywood moment, no doubt to a secluded clearing.So much can go wrong when you're hunting turkeys. But all it takes is one glimpse of a gorgeous turkey strutting, dark tail outlined in gold by the rising sun - it will keep you going for another season, and you'll long remember that sight like an image of promise and hope. There's nothing unfair about that.