Gualter Furtado
Member of the Advisory Council of the Portuguese Order of Economists
Galoshes!
After today’s rain, tomorrow will be a day for high boots—or, as they say on the Portuguese mainland, galochas—if one wishes to venture through Nordeste.
The first time someone on the mainland spoke to me about galochas, I replied that we did not wear that kind of footwear for hunting in the Azores. My companion answered:
“And here I was, thinking it rained in the Azores!”
For us Azoreans, galochas were something quite different: footwear with a wooden sole and a leather strap to hold the foot in place, worn mostly by women.
Gun Cases!
The first time I went hunting wood pigeons at the Herdade de Palma, between Setúbal and Alcácer do Sal, many decades ago, my companion said to me:
“Gualter, don’t forget your funda.”
I looked at him and thought to myself:
“We are going after wood pigeons with a slingshot?”
For us in the Azores, fundas were our primitive hunting weapons. They were made from a Y-shaped piece of wood, with strips of rubber—usually cut from automobile tires—fastened to both ends. These were attached to a small square of leather in which we placed stones or metal pellets. We used them to hunt birds and even wild rabbits.
Only later did I learn that, on the mainland, the fundas my companion was talking about were the cases—or carrying sleeves—in which hunting guns were transported.
That day, just to be safe, I took my Baikal shotgun with me. It was an inexpensive but reliable gun; at the time, my finances did not allow for anything more. What I did not know was that we would be hunting along the outskirts of the Herdade de Palma. At the time, the estate was a private hunting preserve open only to members, so we settled instead on a piece of land where fighting bulls were raised.
It was a risk I have never forgotten—and one that explained both the extraordinary concentration of wood pigeons in the area and the remarkably small number of hunters foolish enough to venture there.
After the Revolution of April 25, when the Herdade de Palma became open hunting ground, I returned there many times. Merely watching those thousands of wood pigeons was, for me, a spectacle unlike any other, as was the whole magnificent ecosystem stretching toward the River Sado.
But that misunderstanding over the word funda was certainly an amusing one…
One country—and so many different expressions!