Ravens on the garden path
I just ran across a particularly impressive garden path sentence in Bernd Heinrich's book RAVENS IN WINTER (p. 268); it took me several tries to get this sentence to parse grammatically:
"Even the wolverine is said to do nothing to drive ravens off that land beside it and steal its food."
(Of course parsing is no problem if the sentence is spoken. But in written form, for me at least, "and steal its food" just didn't seem to fit at first. My mis-parse was reading "off" as the head of a prepositional phrase.)