The earliest Jesuit and French explorers recorded a lack of good hunting among the Indians and filled their journals with numerous accounts of starvation and malnutrition among the indigenous peoples of Lake Superior's south shore. A major problem was the huge forests of white pine. With their lack of understory, they were not conducive to deer populations. Beaver and fish were more abundant. Because of the Peninsula's severe winters, deer regularly migrated to the south from December through April.
Survival becomes a bitter test.
Hundreds of deer crowd into these yards and compete aggressively for shelter and limited food. The deer traveled southward on many trails which by centuries of use had become several feet broad, clear of obstructions, and deeply cut in banks and soft ground. In many swamps they were like the caribou trails found in Newfoundland. It's not an attractive picture. Death by malnutrition is a slow and bitter process.