Trail System

Famous quotes containing the words trail and/or system:

    And Change with hurried hand has swept these scenes:
    The woods have fallen, across the meadow-lot
    The hunter’s trail and trap-path is forgot,
    And fire has drunk the swamps of evergreens;
    Yet for a moment let my fancy plant
    These autumn hills again: the wild dove’s haunt,
    The wild deer’s walk: in golden umbrage shut,
    Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873)

    We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.
    —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. “Strong and Sensitive Cats,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1994)