The air on the morning of October 10, 2012, was brisk, a light breeze shuffling the latest batch of leaves to have given up their grip on nearly bare branches. As the sun was rising, Randy Bolduc left his house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to take his dog to Peirce Island, a little piece of land in the Piscataqua River tethered to the riverbank by two hundred feet and two lanes of asphalt. The snap of the morning wind always made for a hearty walk, but the view from the island is breathtaking in the morning, dawn breaking orange in duplicate, the sky reflecting off the waves of the Piscataqua’s current.
The islet is the size of a decent city park, and that’s what the city has made out of it, with a public swimming pool, walking trails, boat landings, and a dog park—a popular attraction for residents who don’t have large backyards of their own. From Peirce Island, one can follow the winding path carved by the Piscataqua, one of the strongest tidal currents on the continent. It dumps into the sea only three miles farther downstream and, when the tide is rising, flows briskly in the opposite direction. The river, brackish with salt water, marks the border between New Hampshire and Maine, and while it’s mostly rest and recreation on the south side of the water, on the Maine side, Kittery’s shore bustles with workers at the naval shipyard repairing and maintaining nuclear submarines.
Randy Bolduc walked his dog on the island’s trails, picking his path mostly by habit. But on that morning, when he came upon an intersection at which he normally turned left—later saying he’d gone that way at least a hundred times before—Bolduc changed it up and took the path less traveled.
The path to the right dead-ended at a scenic overlook about twenty feet above an outcropping of rocks and the water line. Following the dirt trail, he spotted strange tracks in the ground that varied in depth. The marks were thin, like they’d been made by smooth wheels, but in some places there were two tracks and in others only one. At some points along the path, the marks disappeared altogether, only to start again several feet away.
Bolduc knew bicycles weren’t allowed on this path, but these didn’t seem like bike tracks anyway. It looked more to him like something had been dragged. What he saw on the ground was unusual enough to pique his curiosity. His first thought was that someone had illegally dumped trash in the underbrush, but there wasn’t any trash that he could see.
He walked his dog along the drag marks, following them all the way to the end of the dirt path, where they disappeared and the gravel surface of the scenic overlook, a semicircle ringed with granite block benches and an iron-rod railing, began. The tracks may have vanished when they reached this point, but it was easy for Bolduc to trace their invisible trajectory: a straight line past the railing, down into the Piscataqua River, and into the mouth of the Atlantic Ocean.