At the beginning of R.T. Stewart’s 18-year career as an undercover wildlife officer, Chip Gross wrote a story in Wild Ohio magazine that could have blown Stewart’s cover during a serious poaching investigation. The story pointed out that some wildlife officers in Ohio were working under cover and it discussed the kind of life they had to lead to properly do their jobs.

A poacher read the story and brought it up when a group of bad guys were together, including Stewart, who was undercover, posing as one of them. As it turned out, he wasn’t discovered, but he later told Gross, a fellow wildlife officer, he could have strangled him for writing that story.

“Actually things have changed quite a bit since R.T. was undercover,” said Gross, who wrote the book as told by Stewart. “There are many new methods and we were very careful not to reveal some of the newer techniques.

“I suppose you could say we were walking a fine line, but there is nothing in the book that wasn’t approved by the current undercover operations unit. They read the manuscript and they did ask us to make some changes,” Gross added.

Whatever those changes might have been, they didn’t diminish the excitement that followed Stewart throughout the pages of the book, published a few weeks ago by Kent State University Press. Highlighted are 10 individual cases Stewart worked. All were considered successful because poachers were brought down and convicted of multiple crimes.

Stewart would take months, even years, establishing his cover. He used an alias, set up his operation in a house near the poachers and then went through the time-consuming task of befriending the bad guys, becoming “one of them.”

.

“As an undercover agent you are constantly acting, constantly pretending to be someone you’re not,” Stewart said.

He also explained several times in the book that he was always on alert for something that might blow his cover – not just things he said or did, but the unwitting actions of others. Perhaps he might bump into someone he knew growing up or maybe it might be a uniformed wildlife officer who wasn’t aware Stewart was under cover.

There were times over the years that Stewart was not working an undercover case. It was during one of those times that he and Gross bumped into each other and the idea of a book came about. A few years ago, when Stewart was winding down his career, he brought it up again to Gross and the story telling began.

What came out of those sessions is an exciting saga of a man who put himself into one perilous situation after another.

Poachers Were My Prey is available at bookstores and amazon.com.