Book excerpt: For more than a decade, readers of Shooting Sportsman magazine have delighted in the eccentric character and colorful misadventures of the fictional Major Nathaniel Peabody (U.S. Army, retired). These accounts are delivered in fine fashion by the major's long-suffering lawyer, who manages Peabody's meager trust fund. By popular demand, author Galen Winter collected the finest of his stories in this anthology, The Best of the Major.Just who is Major Nathaniel Peabody? The man who gave him life describes him this way in the book's preface: His extreme independence makes the major popular in some circles and quite unpopular in others. However, the matters that are important to the major do not include a longing for popularity, involvement with any of the temporary fads of society, or conformity with the politically correct. Shooting over an English setter on an abandoned Georgia farm, watching a November sunrise from a Manitoba duck blind, calling Argentine geese into a decoy set spread out on a Patagonia plain . . . -- these are the pursuits that attract the major.