McGregor and the Lost Tribe is an 87,000-word historical novel being dictated to a young minister. The speaker is a Scot from the cursed MacGregor Clan. The narrative explores what would have happened if ONE of the tribes of the Southeast had been able to escape The Trail of Tears? When a young Scot is chased through the hills of Scotland and then across the ocean, he leads the British army on a fox-and-hound chase from Savannah, across Georgia, and over to the ravines of Alabama. Here Levi Philip McGregor gets bagpipe music from a pig and wins sanctuary from the authorities. When Andy Jackson's government wishes to steal the land of the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, it takes someone as sneaky as McGregor to even the odds.
Synopsis for potential translator:
The Scots came to America and frequently intermarried into various tribes of Native Americans. McGregor and the Lost Tribe is the story of a Muskogee tribe that gives refuge to the trickster Levi Philip McGregor. It outlines the assaults on the tribe and McGregor’s tricks that protect the tribe. The story asks “what if?” What would have happened if one tribe could have tricked Washington and kept from being expelled from Alabama in the early 1800s?
The small, devious McGregor, who is sixteen to eighteen, had begun running for his life as a twelve-year-old in Scotland when the English soldiers were trying to kill the McGregor males in his region. Using his wit and his story-telling ability, the boy survives despite his club-foot. He admired the story-telling ability of his late father and the even greater bardic skills of Alistair McAlister. McGregor affects dialects and hones his own skills so that he can imitate an English gentleman, a Cockney, an Irishman, or others.
Genre: FICTION / Action & AdventureModest.
Until the pandemic, mainly had sales during talks to writers’ groups, book fairs, writing conferences and festivals, and cultural events at libraries or museums.
My Scottish world fell apart one day, when I only stabbed one wee knife into one big soldier in a tavern run by a secret kinsman. The tavern keeper had given me shelter during a storm, when an English soldier--a giant of a man--ducked into the tavern, too. The more he drank during the storm, the drunker and meaner he became, and I realized he was the same one who had struck my mother a few weeks before. . . .
We had an exchange, and, when I dismissed him and turned to leave, he grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around and, in doing so, spun my own dagger into his belly and up into his heart. I had no intention of harming the poor soul, you understand, but you have to be careful when you twirl someone about, since accidents will happen.
I run out the door, stopping just long enough to snatch up his bundle and carry it away with me.
As the British soldiers searched for me during the next weeks, I holed up with the soldier’s bundle. ..
I fingered the chanter during the storms and thought of my father and the nights in our cottage, and I began to cry for my wonderful man. Ah, he could sing the ballads, and, with such glorious inspiration, add to them so you could not tell where the old ones left off and Jamie McGregor began. With every song or tale, he could turn a phrase and make your heart flip-flop.
Jamie McGregor peppered his songs and tales with what we in the clan ought to know and to remember in the marrow of our bones and in the deepest parts of our hearts. “Ye heard it: the price of a pardon for that one clan leader was six skulls dug up from the graves of McGregor males.” The tales inflamed the listeners, rightly so, since they would have forgotten and turned to simple herding or farming, if Jamie McGregor, my wonderful father, had not reminded them of their woes.
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Portuguese
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Already translated.
Translated by Ana Eliza Tavares da Contreiras
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