The pilot, to his great credit, knew what to do: he manipulated the controls in such a way as to make the chopper autorotate, converting some of the energy of its fall into passive spinning of the rotors that broke the descent marginally. That, and the fact that they landed at an angle on the snowfield, saved them. Even so, the impact was so sharp that Seamus felt his teeth jumping in their sockets. Because he was biting down, they didn’t slam together and they didn’t bite his tongue off and he hoped that the same was true of the others.