Dynamite, Boilers & Blast

The fuse was cut short or burned fast, no time even to turn. The blast takes you at arm's length, and when the dust settles your right hand is a ruin of bone and powder-black flesh that no surgeon can rebuild, only tidy. The doctor is honest over the ether cone: it comes off at the wrist, or the rot decides for you higher up.

• Ether, bonesaw, and a stump dressed in silk and carbolic, bedridden for days
• Phantom aches where the hand was, you reach for things all week and teach yourself not to
• Learning buttons, reins, and cards with the off hand, a season's work, starting now
• /me stares at the bandaged wrist, flexing fingers that are not there

Recovery Weeks under a surgeon's care while the stump heals clean, or blood poisoning finishes the argument.·Doctor, urgently

The blast turns the rock face into grapeshot. You take a fan of stone fragments through shoulder, ribs, and thigh, and the surgeon spends a lamplit hour with probe and forceps, dropping bits of the mountain into a tin dish while you count the ceiling boards through the laudanum.

• A dozen probed and dressed wounds down one side, stiff, bandaged, and slow for 6 days
• No riding or lifting until the deepest wounds knit, 5 days minimum
• Fever watch for 3 nights; buried grit loves to fester
• The tin dish of rock bits sits on your windowsill as a trophy

Recovery 8 days under a doctor's daily eye, and worse the other way, for deep grit means blood poisoning.·Doctor, urgently

The boiler seam let go and a jet of live steam caught your forearm and shoulder before you could fall away from it. Steam scalds deeper than any flame, the skin comes away with your shirtsleeve, and the dresser's face tells you what the laudanum won't let you feel yet.

• A deep-scalded arm and shoulder dressed in carron oil, the arm slung and useless for 6 days
• Dressings changed daily; the first three are the worst things you've ever sat through
• A glossy, permanent scald scar from elbow to shoulder, your riverboat souvenir
• Fever watch nightly this week

Recovery 2 weeks of dressings with a doctor; scalds this deep fester fast untended.·Doctor, urgently

You were a step past the safe corner when the round fired. The twin punch of the blast wave bursts both eardrums, and the world snaps to a cotton-wool silence broken only by a kettle-hiss that lives in your own skull. Men's mouths move. You answer too loud, guessing.

• Near stone-deaf for 5 days, all business conducted by shouting and gesture
• The ringing makes sleep thin for 3 nights
• Everyone must face you to be understood, and the camp tires of it fast
• /me watches lips intently, then bellows an answer to the wrong question

Recovery 10 days with a doctor keeping them clean and dry; left untended they fester and the deafness can set for good.·Doctor required

The blast catches you side-on and the left eardrum tears with a pain like an ice pick. It heals crooked: the ringing fades over days, but a dull, flattened patch stays in that ear for good, and forever after men learn to stand on your right to be heard.

• Deaf on the left for 4 days, then muffled
• Answering 'WHAT?' becomes your catchphrase for the week, to the camp's delight
• Permanently dull hearing on the left, you pick your seat at every table for the rest of your life
• /me tilts the good ear toward the table and cups a hand around it

Recovery 5 days for the worst of it; what remains of the left ear's hearing is what you keep.·Doctor required

The blast sandblasts your arm and cheek with fine grit and powder, none of it deep, all of it in. The doctor scrubs the wounds with a stiff brush and carbolic, a process considerably worse than the injury, because grit left under skin festers, and some will shadow there as faint blue speckling regardless.

• A scrubbed-raw arm and cheek, stinging under dressings for 4 days
• The carbolic scrubbing becomes its own story, you bit clean through a leather strap
• Faint blue powder speckling remains along the cheekbone, a miner's tattoo
• /me rubs at the blue-shadowed cheekbone out of old habit

Recovery 5 days once scrubbed clean; skip the scrubbing and infection doubles it.·Doctor required

The overpressure picks you up and sets you down somewhere adjacent to your own mind. For hours you are present but not accounted for, answering slow, vomiting once without ceremony, asking after a man who left the camp last spring. The mountain rang you like a bell, and bells take time to quiet.

• Fogged and slow through tomorrow, no decisions, no shooting, no sums
• A headache like a driven wedge for 3 days
• Sick to your stomach the first evening
• /me stares a long moment at a hand of cards, then asks whose it is

Recovery 3 days of quiet with someone watching your sleep the first night, 6 fogged days alone.·Doctor required

When the boiler burst, it threw a fist of iron plate spinning across the deck, and its ragged edge opened your upper arm on the way past. Six stitches of silk close the gash, and the engineer wordlessly hands you the shard afterward. It is heavier than you expected.

• A stitched gash on the upper arm, no heavy lifting or rope work for 4 days
• The stitches tug at every reach; keep them clean for 5 days
• You own the iron shard that nearly owned you, it makes a fine paperweight

Recovery 6 days to stitches-out with a doctor; 9 and a proud scar without.·Doctor required

Your ears took the blast and closed the office. Everything arrives muffled and distant, like conversation through a hotel wall, and you spend two days saying 'WHAT?' with such volume and regularity that the camp cook starts ringing the dinner triangle directly beside you, for justice.

• Muffled hearing and ringing for 2 days, all talk conducted at a shout
• You misheard at least one order today, with consequences to be determined
• /me leans in, cups an ear, and bellows WHAT for the fortieth time

Recovery 2 days; hearing comes back with a pop, like surfacing.·Doctor advised

The round fired true but threw its spoil high, and you stood under the returning payload, a full second of dirt, gravel, and one fist-sized stone that found your shoulder like it had your name on it. A deep bruise blooms across the joint, and grit works into everything you own.

• A stone-bruised shoulder, stiff and tender for 3 days, throwing is off
• Grit in your collar, boots, and dinner for days
• You watch the sky after every shot now, hat brim raised

Recovery 3 days of liniment and one very thorough bath.·Doctor advised

The gas pocket lit with a soft, awful whump and rolled a wave of flame down the drift that was gone before your shout finished. It took your eyebrows, lashes, and the front inch of your hair, and left your face tight, red, and tender as a boiled ham.

• A flash-burned face, red and tender for 3 days, no shaving
• Eyebrows and lashes gone, your face startles people for weeks
• You test the air with a safety lamp now, religiously
• /me blinks lashless eyes, face shiny with lard, entirely without expression

Recovery 3 days for the skin; the eyebrows keep their own calendar.·Doctor advised

The blast wave shoved you like a barroom bully and you sat down hard on the ore cart rail, driving the wind out of one end and the dignity out of the rest. Nothing is broken, but the tailbone bruise makes every chair in camp your personal enemy.

• A bruised tailbone, sitting is a slow, groaning ceremony for 3 days
• Winded and wheezing for the first hour
• You stand at the bar and eat off the mantel this week

Recovery 3 days of standing acquaintance with furniture.·Doctor advised

A spray of unburnt powder grains drove into the back of your hand and forearm, stinging like a hundred wasps with opinions. The doctor picks out what he can, but a dusting of blue-black specks stays under the skin, the miner's mark, they call it, and older men nod at it.

• A stinging, speckled hand and forearm for 2 days
• Permanent blue powder speckling across the hand, your trade, written on you
• Old miners nod to you at the bar now, which is worth something

Recovery 2 days of sting; the speckling is yours for good.·Doctor advised

You were far enough back that the blast merely boxed your ears and filled every seam of your clothing with fine grit. You spend the evening deaf-ish, shaking small gravel out of improbable places, and finding grit in your teeth at supper.

• Light ear-ringing till tomorrow
• Grit in your boots, collar, and biscuit tonight

Recovery A night's sleep and a good shake of every garment.·No doctor needed

A sharp fragment of rock snatched the hat clean off your head and carried it ten feet, leaving a nicked ear-tip and a hole punched through the crown. A half inch lower and this would be a different table entirely. You keep the hat exactly as it is.

• A nicked ear-tip, crusted and stinging for 2 days
• The hat's hole becomes the camp's favorite exhibit
• /me pokes a finger through the hole in the crown and wiggles it

Recovery 2 days; the ear notch heals to nothing much.·No doctor needed

The shot brought down more than rock, the dead air came creeping after it, the afterdamp that snuffs lamps and men. Your candle guttered and you ran, dragging your partner by the collar, and you both burst into the sunlight coughing like consumptives with your heads pounding.

• A crushing afterdamp headache till tomorrow
• Coughing and short-winded for the evening
• You watch the candle flame in the drift now like it's telling fortunes

Recovery Fresh air overnight puts you right.·Doctor advised

The fuse spat, fizzled, and spat again, wrong, all wrong, and you were around the corner and flat on the rock before it decided. The blast threw dust and one pebble that pinged off your boot heel. Your elbows, skinned on the floor, are the day's entire butcher's bill.

• Skinned elbows from the dive, stinging for a day
• You cut every fuse long for the rest of your life

Recovery A day for the elbows.·No doctor needed

The charge fired early, but the muck pile from the last round stood between you and it, and the whole ugly payload slammed into the rubble instead of you. You walked out around the steaming heap and counted your limbs twice on the way. All present.

• Unhurt, dusted grey from head to foot
• You stack the muck pile deliberately between you and every shot now, and tell others why

Recovery None, the rubble retired on your behalf.·No doctor needed

You cut the fuse, lit it, walked, not ran, around the corner, and were leaning against good rock with your fingers in your ears when it fired on your exact count. The concussion patted you on the chest like an old friend. Textbook. The new men stared at you with religion in their eyes.

• Untouched, save dust on your shoulders
• The greenhorns imitate your fuse-counting now, badly
• /me lights the fuse off a cigar, checks a pocket watch, and strolls

Recovery None needed, craft is its own armor.·No doctor needed

The blast should have killed you, instead it picks you up entire and pitches you twenty feet backward into the camp's full water tank, boots over hat, in front of the whole day shift. You surface spluttering, uninjured to the last finger, and behind you the smoke clears off the rock face to show the shot has opened a glittering seam of color nobody knew was there. Someone hands you a towel. The foreman is already calling it your strike.

• Soaked, spluttering, and completely unhurt, twenty witnesses and no explanation
• The new seam carries your name around camp by nightfall
• Free drinks for as long as the vein holds out
• /me wrings out their hat, still sitting in the water tank, and asks if the rock broke

Recovery None, dried off by supper, famous by breakfast.·No doctor needed