GRAND LAKE STREAM – After spending several hours slowly traversing dirt roads from Township 30 to this tiny town nestled in the Maine woods, Jim Gamache walked into the Pine Tree Store on Monday afternoon and asked a simple question.

“Is there a moose tagging station around here?” the Dresden moose hunter asked.

After the laughter died down, store proprietor Kathy Cressey turned to Gamache, still grinning, and replied, “We’re it.”

Yes, the Pine Tree Store is a moose tagging station. Theoretically.

The moose, however, seemed to be taking the day off.

Monday marked the opening day of the state’s split-season hunt. In all, 1,133 hunters earned permits to hunt in designated Wildlife Management Districts in the northern and eastern sections of the state Monday through Saturday.

Another 1,747 hunters will head afield for a six-day session Oct. 8-13.

Maine’s modern moose hunt began in 1980 as an experiment and returned as an annual event in 1982. The vast majority of this year’s 2,880 hunters earned the privilege when their names were drawn in a June lottery. The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife auctioned off 10 permits to raise money for youth outdoor education.

In Wildlife Management District 19, which includes Grand Lake Stream, 71 permits were allotted for the September season, and Cressey and her husband, Kurt, were ready to tag any moose that arrived – if they arrived.

As of 2 p.m., they were still waiting.

“This is the day to pick and choose. You’ve got all week,” Kurt Cressey said. “Some guys will not see a moose and other guys will choose to pass one up. It’s got to be a big bruiser on opening day that you decide to take it.”

After that, Kurt Cressey said, the mind-set of most hunters changes in a predictable fashion.

“Come Wednesday, it’s panic time. Thursday is ‘Woe is me.’ Friday is ‘We’ll stay out a little bit later,'” he said.

And if a hunter finds himself still hunting at the end of the weeklong session – about 80 percent of all hunters are successful each year – the Cresseys have a way to soothe their pain.

“You come in without a moose on Saturday, you get a free cup of coffee,” he said with a chuckle.

The Pine Tree Store has been a registered moose tagging station since 2002. An enthusiastic Kurt Cressey designed and built a majestic scaffold he planned to use to hoist and weigh moose.

He no longer uses that scaffold, which he calls “The F-Troop Lookout Tower.”

Moose hunters liked the tower and would knock on his door late at night so they could have their moose weighed in. That was fine for a while. Then things got worse.

“Two years ago I fell off the tower,” he said. “That was 22 feet. So the $5 I was getting to weigh moose wasn’t beginning to cover the Advil for the pain and aggravation to do it.”

Nowadays, the tower still looks mighty fine. Cressey just hasn’t had the urge to climb it after suffering a concussion, breaking three ribs, and cracking his shoulder blade.

“It’s pretty impressive, but it’s pretty much firewood now,” Kurt Cressey said.

While the tagging was lagging at Pine Tree Store, that doesn’t mean the place wasn’t busy.

Grand Lake Stream is well-known as a fishing destination, after all, and a steady stream of customers stopped by to chat and buy a few items.

Some of the store’s regular customers were easily identifiable: They came bearing dog treats for K.C., the Cresseys’ 10-year-old golden retriever. When treats or back-scratches weren’t forthcoming, K.C. was content to lie in front of the counter, nearly in the shadow of a large stuffed moose head.

“We call her the Wal-Mart dog,” Kathy Cressey said. “She greets everybody.”

K.C. is special to her family, of course. But in this tiny village, she’s a member of the majority, as Kathy Cressey points out.

“There’s more dogs in this town than there are people,” she said with a grin.

Gamache and his party got an early start Monday, but as of midafternoon, their party – and other parties they’d spoken to – was struggling to find moose.

“Nobody’s seen anything today. It’s been tough,” Gamache said.

Gamache said the people in his party had hunted moose before and expected their luck to change.

“We tried, but didn’t see a thing,” he said. “We’ll find one. We always do. We haven’t been skunked yet.”

Although one traditional moose tagging hot spot, Gateway Variety in Ashland, had brisk business Monday, more southerly and eastern locations were seeing little action.

As of 3:15 p.m., the staff at P&J Grocery in Wesley had yet to tag a moose. Farther west on Route 9, Amherst General Store had tagged just three moose by midafternoon.

Game wardens Joseph McBrine Jr. and Wade Carter said they had logged 100 miles of driving and had seen no moose. In addition, they had checked only four hunting parties in that span.

“We haven’t seen that many hunters,” McBrine said. “The last few years it’s been a lot like this.”

The weather Monday was unseasonably warm with temperatures in the mid-70s. The forecast calls for temps in the 80s for the next two days, not ideal for moose hunting.

The wardens said when the weather’s warm, hunters can’t expect simply to drive down dirt roads and find animals.

“We told a few [hunters] that they needed to head into the woods, where it’s shady, where it’s cool, down toward water in some bogs,” Carter said.

McBrine seconded that opinion, pointing out that moose are less active in warm weather.

“They’re still around the water. They’re really hanging around the bogs and lakes and the streams. That’s where we’re seeing all the freshest sign,” McBrine said.

The wardens said warm weather also means most moose will be bagged early in the morning and later in the evening.

And, according to McBrine, that’s the plan some groups seemed to be following.

“A couple of the outfits we talked to seemed pretty hopeful about tonight, from what they had seen this morning,” McBrine said. “They were just getting ready to go back out.”

If the weather remains hot, Cressey – always the entrepreneur – already is thinking of new ways to get hunters into his store.

They may not have a moose to tag. And he may not be willing to weigh one. But he has some fashion ideas that would seem to fit perfectly with the forecast heat wave.

“Do they make shorts of bright orange [that we can sell] for the next couple of days?” he asked.