Read the paragraphs below and answer the questions.
When the black brumby recovered from the battle he had fought, he left the hiding-place in the hills with less than half of the mares following him. For months they wandered, breaking fences, chased by men on swift horses, always escaping, until at last they reached the unfenced, mountainous country to claim a free range of hundreds of miles around them. Their instinct was to choose the heights and the cover of the mountain rocks. Between the rocks the earth was packed with sweet food and the air clean in their nostrils. The vast blue bowl of the sky surrounded them, the burning sun blazed down so that they stood in the black shadows thrown by the tall rocks and drowsed away the middays.
1. What happened to the brumby before this passage begins?
2. What does 'the vast blue bowl of the sky' tell us about the landscape?
At nightfall, when the urge was in them, they swept down the rocky hillside for the sheer joy of movement. Moonlight silvered their running bodies, giving a frosted gleam to the broad black back of their leader. They drank at the river at the foot of their mountain, or tore across the flat lands edging the water, penetrating far into the scrub country, trampling the mud at the edge of the lily-covered lagoon whose water held a strange, sharp sweetness, extracted from the growing plants.
3. Why do the horses run down the hillside at nightfall?
4. What does 'Moonlight silvered their running bodies' mean?
It was wild country. Man, their enemy, worried them little, for the owners of their central mountainous strip, and of the wide, variegated landscape on either side of it, could none of them afford to fence their country in. The herd, though small, was remarkably fine physically in contrast with most brumby herds, in which the thin, harried creatures are not worth the taming.
Circling the plateau claimed by the horses was a wall of closely packed 'organ pipe' rocks of red and grey, towering upwards from the side of the mountain. In the centre of the plateau stood Yarraman, the leader. He was about sixteen hands high, a heavy, plebeian brute with an ugly head and a coarse hide. He limped a little, souvenir of his fight with the silver Pegasus. A close look would have shown scars criss-crossing the hide, where the sharp breezes blew long furrows in the hairy winter growth.
5. Why does the author describe the rocks as 'organ pipe' rocks?
6. How would you describe the character of Yarraman?
7. What impression does the author give of the life these wild horses lead?
8. Why is the word 'souvenir' used to describe Yarraman's limp?