Someone in Henniker may be missing a pet shark. At least, that is the only explanation Brandon Furr could think of for what he found on the Contoocook River earlier this month.

As the 21-year-old student at New Hampshire Community Technical College was paddling down the river with his best friend's parents, they spotted what they think was a mother shark and her babies beached on the shore, a quarter of a mile upstream from the River Road boat launch in Henniker.

"It was kind of out of place," Furr said. "They don't belong there."

Furr, along with Dick and Hilda Weiss, who live a quarter of a mile from the river, were heading from the boat launch toward a nearby swimming hole July 15 when they spied the fish on the bank. At first, they thought they were freshwater fish until they took a closer look. According to Dick Weiss, 59, when they paddled closer, they saw a large fish with its midsection chewed out. The tail and upper body still were intact, and Weiss said he saw a tail fin, a mouth and big eyes.

Weiss said he was confident it was a shark, though he could not be 100 percent sure.

According to Furr, the adult was about 10 inches wide and 2½ feet long, though Weiss estimated it was closer to 18 to 20 inches long. It had about 10 embryos and two or three babies, each 4 inches long and 2 inches wide, Furr estimated. The babies that made it out of the eggs still had the yolk sac placenta attached to them, which is how baby sharks are nourished until they are old enough to feed themselves. They were all dead by the time the group found them that afternoon. Sharks cannot survive in freshwater.

Furr said Weiss poked the adult with a stick to make sure it was dead. Then, they discovered flies were feeding on the carcass. "It was pretty nasty," Furr said.

Weiss found a bottle by the side of the river, scooped up one of the babies and threw it in the back of his pickup truck when they got back to shore. The next morning, Weiss saw Officer Amy Bossi of the Henniker police at the boat ramp and told her the story. Bossi was on vacation last week, but another Henniker officer confirmed that Bossi had seen the baby shark. The police called the state Fish and Game Department.

No one has yet figured out how the fish got there, beyond the assumption that someone had been keeping the mother in a saltwater tank and decided to get rid of it. "My only guess is perhaps someone had a shark as a pet and couldn't keep it, so they dumped it into the river, and it survived long enough to have young ones," said Sgt. Matthew French of the Henniker police.

"There's probably one big fish tank in Henniker," Weiss said.

The Fish and Game Department has not confirmed that in fact the fish were sharks, Lt. John Whitmore said. Weiss went back to the site late last week at the request of an investigator, but nothing was left of the fish.

Weiss, a state employee, and Furr both said they are frequent kayakers who go out two or three times a week and are familiar with river wildlife. Neither has seen anything that looked like a shark before.

But a week later, many Henniker residents still can't believe the story. Volunteer firefighter Wes Nelson, 21, said he heard rumors that sharks had washed ashore but figured it must be a mistake. "It had to be a catfish,"he said.

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By SHIRA SCHOENBERG

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