Laurie Hayden and her husband, Mitch, headed into the woods on Monday morning looking to bag a Maine moose.

The Cornville couple didn’t waste any time and were the first to bring a moose to the Greenville Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife facility that serves as a tagging station.

There was, however, a small problem: When you shoot a moose in the opening hour of the opening day of the season, it gets a bit tougher to justify your absence from home.

Tougher. But not impossible.

“The kids are with babysitters,” Laurie Hayden said with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘I should go home.’ But I think we’re going to stay another day … or for the week. We’ll just tell them we shot it on Friday.”

This week’s hunt marks the second six-day session that makes up Maine’s split moose season.

Hunters were treated to perfect weather, with temperatures in Greenville hovering around 45 degrees at midday. During the first moose-hunting session two weeks ago, hunters dealt with temperatures in the 80s, which drove moose toward cool wooded spots and water. As a result, many stations tagged fewer moose than they normally do.

This week 1,747 permit holders have headed into the woods in all of the state’s Wildlife Management Districts that are open to moose hunting.

The first session ran from Sept. 24-29, during which 1,133 permit-holders tried to bag a moose in WMDs spanning the northern and eastern portions of the state. In all, the state issued 2,880 moose permits this year.

Laurie Hayden was the permit-holder in her hunting party, but her husband, a moose-hunting veteran, ended up shooting the 735-pound bull, which sported a 41-inch rack.

“The plan originally was for him to shoot, but then we went target practicing yesterday and I did pretty good,” Laurie Hayden said. “So then I was going to shoot it.”

The moose had other ideas.

“It was moving too fast for me,” Laurie Hayden said. “I couldn’t get a sight on it.”

Mitch Hayden took charge from there, on what friends had begun calling his “third annual moose hunt.”

A year ago, he had a permit of his own. The year before that, his dad held the permit.

But this hunt was by far the simplest, he said.

“There might be a little celebration tonight. Usually we ride around for the whole week to get one,” Mitch Hayden said. “We get tired of riding around in the truck.”

Mitch Hayden said he planned to get in a little bird hunting before heading back to Cornville, while his wife had other plans.

“I’ve got three books to read, and I haven’t read any yet,” she said.

In Greenville, the tagging activity as of noontime was about average, DIF&W wildlife biologist Doug Kane said.

The first moose – the one shot by Mitch Hayden – arrived at about 10 a.m. By 11, there was a line of four trucks outside the makeshift tagging station, waiting for available DIF&W staffers to make measurements, check for winter ticks and pull a tooth that will be used to determine each moose’s age.

By noon, those trucks were gone, and fewer than 10 moose had been tagged.

For years, Greenville enjoyed a reputation as one of the state’s moose-tagging hotspots, but in recent years, that has changed a bit.

This year marked the first year in several that Greenville didn’t have an on-site butcher shop open during moose season.

“The first two days of moose season, we’d do between 115 and 135 moose [per day],” Kane said. “The highest was 139. The reality is, it just made it difficult to get the hunters through, so we started opening stations as we increased permits.”

Now, the festival atmosphere at Greenville has waned, and a small crowd of about 50 spectators milled around the DIF&W lot, waiting to watch the tagging process.

Kane said he’d consider it a good day if 30 moose were tagged at the station on Monday.

Paul Bedard of Randolph, Ohio, was the second lucky hunter to arrive in Greenville. His moose was a 755-pounder with a 44-inch rack.

Bedard said he has hunted deer and turkeys in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania and is relatively new to the Maine moose-lottery process.

“I came on vacation up here about 10 years ago and started applying [for a permit] after seeing them,” Bedard said. “I’ve had some brothers-in-law that hunted Quebec and I didn’t go with them because they didn’t do very well for the amount of time that they kept going up there.”

Bedard’s hunt ended shortly before 8 a.m., when he and two friends saw some cow moose near the side of a road.

The bull was nearby, and by 11 a.m., the hunting party – including 82-year-old Jimmy Ederer of Akron, Ohio – had hauled the moose back to Greenville.

Another hunter, 11-year-old David Richards of Rockport, also filled his tag early, and headed to Greenville in a pickup truck, with a small Jeep and the moose sharing space on a large trailer.

Richards explained that the Jeep had a winch, which came in handy.

“We called it out of the woods and he stepped up on a log, broadside,” Richards said. “I took the shot, and then my uncle came back with two more shots, and he dropped.”

As of noontime, their moose was the largest to be tagged in Greenville. The 13-pointer sported a 44-inch spread and weighed in at 850 pounds.

The Rockport youth said the group had already decided what to do with their trophy.

“We’re going to mount it and put it in our cabin,” Richards said.

John Holyoke can be reached at jholyoke@bangordailynews.net or by calling 990-8214 or 1-800-310-8600.