Head & Neck Graze: Rifle Graze

The round plows a gutter along the side of your skull and the bone caves inward like lake ice. You drop where you stand, and when you surface, whole hours are missing and your own name comes slow.

• Unconscious or barely sensible for hours; you are carried, not walking
• Memory gaps and a temper you don't recognize, play it for 7 days at least
• Vomiting and uneven pupils; total bed rest for 5 days, moved only by wagon
• /me stares through a familiar face, searching for the name that goes with it

Recovery A doctor must lift the bone within hours; 7 days abed after even so. Untreated, the pressure kills you slow.·Doctor, urgently

The round creases your crown hard enough to crack the skull's outer shell without breaking through. You wake to lamplight, vomit once, and cannot make the room hold still.

• Bed rest for 3 days in dim rooms only; daylight drives nails through your eyes
• No riding faster than a walk and no shooting for 4 days
• Head bandaged tight over a swollen, spongy line of scalp

Recovery 5 days under a doctor's watch for the sickness to pass, 7 and worse odds gambling without.·Doctor required

The crease along your scalp is almost tidy. What isn't: the whole day is gone. The last thing you remember is breakfast, and folk keep telling you what you said an hour ago.

• The day of the shooting is a blank for now, pieces drift back slowly over the week
• You ask the same question twice for 2 days; write things down
• Headache lodged behind the eyes for 3 days

Recovery 3 days of enforced quiet with a doctor, 6 foggy days without.·Doctor required

The round digs a trench from above your ear nearly to the crown, deep enough that the doctor's probe scrapes bone the whole way. It takes a long row of silk to close it.

• Twenty stitches under a full head wrap for 4 days
• Scalp too tender for a hat for 5 days; sun and rain are your problem now
• A furrow scar you could lay a pencil in, hairless for life

Recovery 4 days stitched and washed with carbolic, 7 seeping and fever-prone without.·Doctor required

The crease at your temple is shallow but the shock behind it is not. There are two of everything a rifle needs there to be one of, and they slide apart whenever you tire.

• Double vision comes and goes for 3 days, no shooting, no card-sharping
• Reading turns your stomach for 2 days
• /me squints one eye shut to line the two worlds back into one

Recovery 3 days resting the eyes on a doctor's say-so, 5 stubborn ones without.·Doctor required

The round passes so close to your ear that the crack alone bursts something inside it. The graze on your scalp is a scratch; the silence on that side is the real wound.

• Near-deaf on one side for 5 days, people must stand at your good ear
• A high whine in the ear at night; sleep comes hard for 2 days
• You startle at nothing and miss whole sentences in a crowd

Recovery Hearing seeps back over 5 days, 7 with the whine lingering if untreated.·Doctor required

The round lifts a palm-sized flap of scalp and leaves it hanging by a hinge of skin. The doctor lays it back like a page and sews the book shut.

• Head wrapped like a pasha for 3 days; the flap must not be disturbed
• No hat, no brawling, nothing that pulls at the scalp for 4 days
• /me resettles the linen wrap, wincing where the stitches pull

Recovery 4 days for the flap to knit under a doctor's stitching, 6 and a ragged scar without.·Doctor required

The round creases your crown and the shock takes your legs. You wake in the dirt beside your horse with a bleeding head, a bitten tongue, and bruises the fall threw in for free.

• A stitched crease plus fall bruises down one whole side for 3 days
• The bitten tongue makes hot coffee and cursing painful for 2 days
• Woozy in the saddle the first day back, walk the horse only

Recovery 3 days with a doctor totting up both bills, 5 if you climb straight back on.·Doctor required

The round draws a shallow furrow along the side of your head, cauterizing itself as it goes. It barely bleeds; it will also never grow hair again.

• Burnt furrow dressed with salve for 2 days
• A headache like a two-bottle hangover through the first day
• A white streak of scar through your hair, visible across a room

Recovery 2 days of salve, 3 dry and itching without.·Doctor advised

A shallow crease over the ear and a head full of bells. The crack of the near miss lives on in your skull, a bright whine running under everything anyone says.

• Constant ringing for 2 days; you talk too loud and hate quiet rooms
• /me taps the side of their head as if the sound might shake loose
• A dressed crease over the ear, hat worn pushed back off it for 2 days

Recovery The whine fades in 2 days, 4 if you keep shooting beside it.·Doctor advised

The round burns a line along the side of your neck, and snapping your head away from it wrenches everything from ear to shoulder. The graze is a scratch; the neck is the complaint.

• Stiff neck for 3 days, checking behind you means turning your whole body
• A shallow dressed burn line along the neck for 2 days

Recovery 3 days of liniment, 4 turning like a fence post without.·Doctor advised

The crease across your scalp drops you to a knee, and for a few minutes the world runs strange, you know the faces but not the year. It all comes back by supper, mostly.

• Confused and repeating yourself for the first hours; keep a friend close for 1 day
• A dressed shallow crease and a dull headache for 2 days

Recovery A day of rest and you're near right; 2 to be certain of it.·Doctor advised

The round lays a hot stripe over your ear, blistering the skin and singeing the hair above it to grey crumbs. Painful, stinking, and shallower than it feels.

• Blistered stripe dressed in salve for 2 days; the hat brim rides on it cruelly
• A singed patch of hair that crumbles when touched

Recovery 2 days of salve, 3 with weeping blisters without.·Doctor advised

The round skims your brow ridge, and the split drops a curtain of blood over one eye. It looks like a war wound and closes with a single strip of plaster.

• A plastered brow and a spectacular black eye for 3 days
• Blood-crusted lashes till you wash; folk keep offering you a chair

Recovery 2 days plastered, 3 with a wider scar without.·No doctor needed

You feel the wind of it against your cheek and a sting at the temple where it touched just enough to burn. A finger's width of red scrape and a whole new caution.

• A red scrape at the temple for 2 days
• /me touches the scrape at their temple and lets out a long breath

Recovery Fades in 2 days on its own.·No doctor needed

The round clips a lock of hair off above your ear as clean as shears. Beneath it the skin is scraped red, and the missing patch shows every time you doff your hat.

• A scraped red patch under a missing tuft of hair for a day
• A lopsided haircut that lasts until a barber evens it out

Recovery A day for the sting; longer for the barber's opinion of you.·No doctor needed

The round scores the rim of your ear in passing, a shallow hot scratch. It bleeds three drops and rings for an hour, and that is the whole of the bill.

• A scratched ear rim, tender for a day
• Ringing on that side for an hour or two

Recovery Nothing a night's sleep won't settle.·No doctor needed

The round tears a groove along your hat crown at the band and lifts it clean off your head. Your scalp shows a red pressure line where the band dragged, and not one drop of blood.

• A red pressure line across the scalp until morning
• A hat with a story, worn a little looser now

Recovery None needed, just go fetch your hat.·No doctor needed

The round smashes the post beside your head, and the wound you take is from the wood, a spray of splinters across cheek and ear, picked out one by one with tweezers and cussing.

• Half a dozen splinter marks on one cheek for 2 days
• You flinch away from fence posts for a day, and nobody blames you

Recovery An evening with tweezers; gone in 2 days.·No doctor needed

You stoop for a dropped coin at the very crack of the shot, and the round takes your hat off your head instead of taking your head. You straighten up holding the coin and the story of your life.

• Not a mark on you, the hat carries the only wound
• /me flips the coin that saved their life and catches it without looking
• The coin gets shown in every saloon within a week's ride

Recovery Nothing to heal; the coin retires undefeated.·No doctor needed