Bugle Boys: The Fields family is all about elk

If you were to walk by Josh Fields’ house in Columbia Falls on any given day, you might just hear the bugle of an elk or the mew of a cow.

Fields practices calling elk day and night, sometimes to the sighs of his wife, Carla.

“He practices in the house, in the bathroom, in the garage, in the car,” she says with a smile during a recent interview.

It’s all good — Fields, in his rookie elk calling competition, took third at the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation World Elk Calling Championship in the pro division earlier this month in Park City, Utah.

Fields is part of the pro staff for Rocky Mountain Elk Calls. Rockie Jacobsen, his mentor and former owner of the company, talked him into going down and entering the competition, which draws the best elk callers in the world.

“I just wanted to get out of the first round,” Fields said.

Instead, he beat Jacobsen in an early round and made it into the semis, before taking third.

Fields was pleasantly surprised at the outcome, but he’s certainly no stranger to the woods, or to hunting success. The 1998 Columbia Falls graduate has been hunting since he was 12 and took his first bull elk at 17. He played professional baseball for nearly a decade out of college before returning home and getting into archery hunting.

Archery hunting is difficult by any measure, but it does allow one to hunt elk during the rut and that’s where Fields honed his calling skills, with friend and longtime hunting partner Doug Meyer.

The woods in Northwest Montana are challenging, to say the least.

“It’s some of the toughest hunting there is,” he said. “Because of predators and hunting pressure.”

He says he’s been fortunate to have success every year for the past 10 years or so. All of it on public lands, he notes.

Perseverance is a key.

“When you think you’ve gone far enough, go another five miles,” he said.

A successful hunt isn’t defined by the kill, Fields notes. It’s about the experience and the friendships. The family eats everything he shoots, though he admits the trophy mountain goat he took in southern Montana was a bit stringy.

The Fields have two young boys, Keller and Reid. They boys like to practice their elk calling, too, which makes for a raucous house at times. After doing well at the world competition, Fields isn’t sure what the future holds.

But ask him how many days a year he spends in the woods.

“As many as I can,” he says.