Across the northern part of Idaho and Montana, over a wicked country of mountains and cañons, the western division of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad runs all its trains by electricity, as you have read in your last month's number of "St. Nicholas," while farther south, across Utah and Colorado, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad Company completed its plans three years ago for the electrification of its road to Denver; but the scheme of the kaiser to lick the world in ninety days failing, material became too costly to warrant the change from steam to electricity. But the power is ready or could quickly be made ready. Every year the two great companies which have been formed by the consolidation of numerous small owners of power-plants, are building dams and reservoirs and flumes, getting ready for the not far distant day when steam-engines will have to be looked for in the Museum of Antiques and Curiosities in Salt Lake City. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ OUT IN THE BIG-GAME COUNTRY BY CLARENCE H. ROWE In the big-game country! Is there a healthy, red-blooded American boy who does not feel a thrill of excitement at the thought? In spite of our civilization, there is, in many, a lingering thrill in the very thought of the chase, handed down through a long line of ancestry dating back to the time when the chase meant food rather than sport. The stage setting for big game is perfect. In the sheep country of Wyoming or the deer country of Colorado it is at an altitude of from nine to thirteen thousand feet above sea-level, where the air is clear and crisp with the tang of winter, the huge stretches of wild open country lying like a picture at one's feet. Could anything be more beautiful and invigorating? A reconnoitering-point will sometimes reveal a view of almost a hundred miles. Across a gulch of some twenty miles the distant buttresses of red sandstone rock are painted with slashes of golden copper, the somber pines straggling almost to the top, interwoven with the delicate tracery of the quaking asps, now beautifully colored by the frosts. At our feet nestles a "park" (as the valleys are called), and possibly a silvery thread of water winds in and out. Nature paints with a full, rich palette in this glorious Western country! The skies rival those of Italy in depth, and, while possibly a bit more crude in raw color, are, for this very reason, more in keeping with the broad, vigorous landscape. In the big-game country everything is big--not only the game, but the mountains, the valleys, and the people. Small statures bred in these surroundings expand and broaden--it is only natural. All this seems far removed from the subject of elk, Rocky Mountain sheep, and bear, but to every true sportsman these constitute fully one half of the game.