Once he arrived at the Jonathan sat on a boulder and watched his dog, Hoolihan, outrun the spilling waves and then chase them back to sea in an endless cycle of fun. He closed his eyes, listening to the crashing waves, an oddly comforting sound he had loved ever since he was a child. Soon another sound reached his ears, like an unexpected voice in a the faint but unmistakable bleating of sheep. He knew the sheep couldn't be heard this far from the farm. For a moment, he wondered if he were daydreaming or falling asleep. When he opened his eyes, Hoolihan was furiously barking behind him, causing Jonathan to turn around abruptly. To his horror, he saw dozens of sheep trying to hold their ground as they closer and closer to the edge of the cliff.

[1] nothing that comes from the desert expresses its extremes better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the sierras and coastwise hills. the yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age like an old [5] man's tangled gray beard, tipped with panicles of foul, greenish blooms. after its death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes even the moonlight fearful. but it isn't always this way. before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a luxurious, creamy, cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap. the indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast the prize for their [10] own delectation why does the author use the words "bayonet-pointed" (line 4) and "fence of daggers" (line 9) to describe the leaves of the yucca tree? . to create an image of the sharp edges of the plant to emphasize how beautiful the plant's leaves are to explain when and where the plant grows to show how afraid the author is of the plant