The tower in the city makes its second important appearance, again discovering an approaching army of Lamanites. Limhi prepares his people as well as he is able to defend their homes. Verse 11 notes that even though they were outnumbered, they began to have success because their stakes were so high. They were fighting for their homes and families.
There are two interesting analogies used in these verses. In both verses 10 and 11 Mormon describes the people of Limhi fighting. The first metaphor is that they “fought like lions for their prey.” The second is that “like dragons did they fight.” Modern readers can understand the imagery. We have some notion of powerful lions fighting for prey, and even though we understand dragons as fictional animals, we understand that they could be considered fierce fighters.
We do not know what the references were in the language of the plates. What we have is the English translation, but there were no lions, and the concept of dragons was also an Old World image. This suggests that we have the metaphors in a translation that we could understand, but that the original metaphor might have been animals with which the Nephites and Lamanites would have been familiar. For lions, it is easy to suggest that it could have been a jaguar, which was one of the most powerful New World predators. The second could easily have been a crocodile, which appears frequently in Mesoamerican imagery. Both are plausible for the plate-language metaphors.