I never bother making bowls for trade goods. After you have a bow and some arrows you can kill large game, you just have to find them. I roam the woods climbing trees until I see something. Seems like large animals are everywhere, you just have to look around a bit. Every time I've tried I've managed to find something big - reindeer, elk, stag, bear. Be well rested before you start so you don't get sleepy, and try to start early in the morning so you have all day. Travel as light as possible - if its not cold consider leaving your clothing behind if you've had trouble hunting before. Every pound counts - get the carrying penalty as low as possible. Just take a bow, a dozen or so arrows, and a 1 pound knife (small knife or regular knife).
The large animals leave tracks, and if you run (shift R) while following them you can usually catch up to them long enough to get a few arrows off. All it takes is one good hit to down them, although it might take quite a few if you're not getting decisive hits. All you need is one good kill and you can trade for quite a bit of stuff. Just the meat alone allows you to quickly trade for a few things, then once you have the hide tanned you can make fur clothing which trades for even more. A single reindeer gives you at least 8 pounds of fur, which can make a few good pieces of fur clothing. I was able to make 3 fur footwears with a reindeer I killed (2.8 lbs each), and the footwear seem to trade for quite a bit.
If you start in the north you can even trade some of your starting clothes for a northern bow and bunch of arrows. They are very powerful bows and make hunting large game much easier. I dropped a reindeer in one shot to the head, it hit the neck and knocked the animal unconscious. The shops of the south are nice, but I find the ability to trade for northern bows and arrows from the adventurers of the north to be a good enough reason to start there, or at least make the trip there eventually. I visited Seal Tribe territory, and it seems like everywhere you look up there you can find an adventurer or hunter carrying a bow (either longbow or northern bow) and a few dozen arrows, both of which he is happy to trade away. Upgrading from a short bow to a northern bow is a huge difference - the range is better so you'll score more hits, and each hit counts for a lot more. My character only has 59% bow skill, yet he can drop large animals with ease due to the good bow. The only thing I'd really find lacking by starting up north would be a punt, since you can't buy one there - but it's probably easier to travel south for a punt once you have a good food supply than travel north for a bow after you have a punt.
It actually seems a bit too easy to get food once you have a good bow and can easily hunt large animals. I just went out in the early morning climbing trees looking for an animal, spotted a big stag, tracked it down and killed it (took 7 shots, although I had to run it about 5 load screens to get them off since it was actively avoiding me in a thick forest), cut it up and got over 500 pounds of meat - as well as a fur weighing 19. It's currently late october, and I dried 500lbs of the meat and roasted the rest. That one kill will probably feed me through the winter without even having to go out and hunt more. On the way back I even saw an elk, but didn't bother going after it since I already had the stag.
Another tip: When running down an animal you're tracking, keep your fatigue bar low. Each time you spot it and get a shot off and it steps out of sight try stepping a few more times while running to see if you can get another shot off, but if it got away its best to use hide and just sneak along a bit until your fatigue bar is empty. Then run after it again until you get another shot at it or your fatigue bar is going up (I try to keep mine below 5).
Those short sprints between your being hidden and the fatigue bar being 0 and your fatigue going up is usually where I get the windows to fire an arrow. I think what happens is when your hidden you can get a little bit closer than just running behind it, and then when you start running after it at full speed with 0 penalty you can close in before it dashes off. Occasionally you can get close enough just by walking while hiding, but watch for a message saying something is escaping (it saw you) - if you see that try running to see if you can get a clear shot before its gone again.