The Last River

Davin's parable

My friend Davin told me a story recently that I have not been able to put down, because it is not a fable — it is happening right now, every year, in Idaho.

The Nez Perce Tribe — the Nimiipuu, "the People" — live in the high country of the Snake and Clearwater river basins, some six hundred river miles from the Pacific Ocean. Theirs is the far end of the salmon's world: the last hatchery on the river, with essentially nothing upstream of them — the headwaters, the top of the run, the place where the journey ends. And there they operate one of the great fish-raising works on the continent: tribal and co-managed hatcheries that breed and release millions of young salmon and steelhead every year — as Davin tells it, on the order of four million fish sent down the river toward the sea.

Now follow the geometry, because the geometry is the parable. The young fish stream down from Nez Perce waters — down the Clearwater, down the Snake, down the Columbia, past every tributary and town and net, out into the ocean, where they grow for years and feed the whole marine web. And then the survivors turn around and come home — and to reach the waters of their birth they must run the entire gauntlet in reverse: up the Columbia, up the Snake, past eight federal dams, past every downstream fishery — commercial, sport, and tribal — every one of which harvests from the run before it reaches Nez Perce country, because everyone else on the river is downstream of the return. The people who gave the river its millions receive the run last — after everyone — and by the time the survivors reach the last river, the tribe's own return is a fraction: by Davin's telling, one half of one percent of what they released. The tribe's own fisheries managers have said essentially the same in public — returns under two percent for their hatchery coho, under one percent for the wild fish. Four million given. A remnant of a remnant received.

And here is the fact that turns the arithmetic into a parable: they keep doing it. Every year. Knowing the numbers. The people at the last river go on filling the whole watershed and the ocean beyond it with life, feeding every fisher and eagle and economy downstream of them, and receiving, at the end of the gauntlet, almost nothing back.

Davin saw the gospel in it, and he is right. Let me show you how deep it runs.

The fish that comes home

Begin with the salmon itself, because God built a doctrine into this animal. A salmon is born in one particular stream and imprints on its waters — carries the chemical signature of home in its body for life. Then it descends: down the rivers, out into the vast ocean, scattered across thousands of miles among all the currents of the world, indistinguishable in the great schools of the sea. And then, after years, it turns — finds the one river mouth among hundreds, and begins the ascent: upstream, against the whole force of the current, leaping falls, refusing every easier water, home to the exact gravel bed where it began. And there it spawns — and dies. And even its death is a gift: salmon carcasses, rich with the ocean's nutrients, feed the bears and eagles and insects of the high country; scientists have found the ocean's own chemistry in the trees along salmon rivers — the forests themselves are partly built from the bodies of returned fish — and the young that hatch in those waters begin life in a stream their parents' deaths enriched.

Now hear the scriptures speak over that life cycle. This is the gathering of Israel, as biology: a covenant people born in one stream, scattered into the ocean of the nations, indistinguishable for generations among the world's currents — and then, in the last days, turning: "And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people... and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth" (Isaiah 11:11–12). The return is always against the current — repentance, the scriptures' word for it, literally means to turn around — an ascent against the flow of the whole world, back to natal waters, back to covenants, back to the God on whom the soul imprinted before it ever left home. And the salmon's ending is the pattern of the Lord of the whole gathering: the One who descended below all things, returned against every current of death and hell, and gave his body — whose given life is the nutrient of the entire watershed of creation: "I am the bread of life... the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world" (John 6:35, 51). Every autumn, the rivers of the Northwest preach the atonement in silver and red: descend, return, give the body, and the whole land lives.

The people at the headwaters

Now the tribe's position on the river — because their geography is a priesthood.

Four thousand years ago, God made a covenant with Abraham whose center clause defines what it means to be a chosen people: "in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed" (Genesis 12:3). Chosen, in the Bible, never meant chosen-as-consumer — first in line at the blessing window. It meant chosen-as-conduit: the family through whom the blessing flows outward to everyone else; the people God positions at the headwaters of the world so that what they pour runs down to all nations. The priesthood itself is defined this way in the revelations: the covenant seed are told "ye are lawful heirs... and the priesthood hath continued through the lineage of your fathers... Therefore your life and the priesthood have remained, and must needs remain through you and your lineage... a light unto the Gentiles, and through this priesthood, a savior unto my people Israel" (D&C 86:8–11). Saviors. Light-bearers. A hatchery people — commanded, in Jacob's phrase, to "raise up seed unto me" — whose whole vocation is to fill the watershed with life that mostly blesses somebody else's river.

And the Nez Perce fishery is that covenant, performed in public, with the geometry exact: they give first and receive last. The blessing leaves their hands at the headwaters and flows down through everyone — every downstream net is fed by fish the tribe released; the ocean itself is richer for their hatcheries — and the return reaches them only after passing through all other hands, diminished to a remnant. That is the economics of heaven's own sowing, which the Lord described in his first great parable: the sower goes forth and broadcasts — on the path, on the stones, among the thorns, on the good ground alike — scattering seed he knows will mostly feed birds and strangers and other people's fields, because divine sowing was never optimized for the sower's return; it was optimized for the field. It is the widow's cruse of oil, which "failed not" — but only flowed while she poured. It is the arithmetic of the widow's two mites, which outweighed the treasury because God measures the outflow, not the retained. A people who release four million and keep a half percent are not running a failed fishery. They are running the covenant: the open channel, the almost-pure conduit, the hand that stays open at the headwaters whatever comes back — and by that measure, which is the only measure heaven uses, the last hatchery on the river is the richest water in the basin.

The remnant at the last river

And now the layer that turns this parable from beautiful to prophetic — because in the teaching of the restored gospel, that tribe is not merely like the covenant people. The Book of Mormon's own claim is that the peoples of ancient America included the family of Lehi, a branch of the house of Joseph, led from Jerusalem to this land as a covenant colony — and that the descendants of Lehi's people are among the ancestors of the indigenous peoples of the Americas (that is the church's careful current language, and we use it plainly). By that record's claim, the native peoples of this land stand within what the scriptures call the remnant of Jacob — heirs of the promises made to the fathers, the branch of the covenant tree planted in the New World.

And to that remnant, the Book of Mormon makes a promise whose shape is exactly Davin's arithmetic. Nephi, shown the whole future of his people — their dispossession, their scattering, the gospel coming to the Gentile nations of this land first — closes the vision with the reversal: "And the time cometh that he shall manifest himself unto all nations... And behold... the Gentiles first, and then unto the Jews... and the last shall be first, and the first shall be last" (1 Nephi 13:42). The covenant order of the last days runs Gentiles-first, remnant-after — the very people through whom the covenant entered the hemisphere receive its return last, at the end of the gauntlet, after every downstream nation has harvested from a run their fathers seeded. The resurrected Lord, teaching in America, laid out the same schedule and its ending: the gospel goes to the Gentiles first, and then "I will bring my gospel unto the remnant of my people... and I will establish my church among them" — with the remnant promised a place at the center of the New Jerusalem itself (3 Nephi 16, 20–21). The revelations of this dispensation add the image of springtime: "before the great day of the Lord shall come... the Lamanites shall blossom as the rose" (D&C 49:24). Last on the river. Promised first in the restoration. The Nez Perce at their hatchery are not just a metaphor for the covenant remnant. By the record's own claim, they may well be covenant remnant — still at the headwaters, still tending the waters, still giving millions and receiving a remnant — the "last" clause of Nephi's verse lived out annually, with the "shall be first" clause standing in the ledger, waiting, with their name on it.

The mingled run

There is one more piece of Davin's telling, and it is the piece that could read as tragedy until scripture reads it back: the hatchery fish and the wild fish have interbred for generations now, until — as Davin puts it — the pure native fish are essentially gone; the run is all mingled stock.

An ecologist grieves that honestly, and the grief is real; hold it. But an ancient prophet named Zenos, preserved in the Book of Mormon, told the whole history of Israel as the story of an olive orchard — and the center of his allegory is precisely this mingling. The tame olive tree (Israel) begins to decay; and the Lord of the vineyard does something audacious: he grafts wild branches into the tame tree, and carries the tame tree's natural branches away and plants them throughout the vineyard — hidden in far corners, mingled with wild stock, until no observer could tell which trees carried the natural line at all (Jacob 5). The scattering-and-mingling is not the covenant failing. It is the covenant's method: Israel's seed sown into all nations, mixed into every people, so that blessing all families of the earth and blessing hidden Israel become the same act — "For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth" (Amos 9:9). Sifted everywhere; nothing lost. Every grain accounted for; everything distributed. And Zenos shows the ending, which is the healed river at orchard scale: in the last labor, the Lord grafts the natural branches back in, and the trees "became like unto one body; and the fruits were equal; and the Lord of the vineyard had preserved unto himself the natural fruit, which was most precious unto him from the beginning" (Jacob 5:74). One body. Fruits equal. The natural line, preserved through the mingling and restored out of it — no pure-wild and no mere-hatchery at the end, just one run, whole. And through the allegory's final scenes moves the figure the Nez Perce fisheries workers embody every season: the servants — few, laboring in the vineyard's last hour, tending trees they did not plant for fruit they will mostly never eat — with the sentence over them that may be the tenderest in the whole allegory: "and the Lord of the vineyard labored also with them" (Jacob 5:72).

The ledger of the last river

So here is what Davin's parable means, spelled all the way out — and it is not an abstraction, because the tribe's actual record proves the ledger works on a schedule longer than any single season. Coho salmon were declared extinct in the entire Snake River basin in the 1980s — the run was gone, a lost strand of creation. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Nez Perce brought them back — starting from borrowed hatchery stock, releasing year after year into the Clearwater — and the coho returned: a run rebuilt from zero, one of the only recovered salmon runs of its kind anywhere, with federal fisheries officials publicly crediting the tribe's persistence and noting that the recovery is benefiting many others besides. Snake River fall chinook returns in their country have climbed from a few hundred fish to tens of thousands, and a harvest closed for a generation reopened. Their steelhead have been found as far away as Russian waters — the last river's gift, swimming in another hemisphere. The people who receive least have resurrected runs, restocked an ocean, and fed a watershed the size of a small nation — and the ledger that says they are being shortchanged at a half percent is simply the wrong ledger. By heaven's accounting — the accounting that measures a widow by her mites and a sower by his scattering and a Savior by what he gave — the last hatchery on the river is the first fountain in the basin.

That is the covenant of Abraham, in waders: raise up seed at your own cost; release it to the world's ocean; feed every river downstream of you; keep almost nothing; and trust the God whose arithmetic runs the other way. It is what a consecrated family is, what a covenant people is for, what every tithe and mission and act of unrepaid love participates in — the headwaters life, the open channel, the blessing that flows down through everyone and returns as a remnant, for now. For now — because the promise standing over the last river is the oldest reversal in the book, spoken by the Lord of the vineyard about exactly such people, and it has never been revoked:

The last shall be first.

And when that day comes — when the natural branches are grafted home, and the remnant blossoms as the rose, and the run returns whole to the waters that gave it — the people at the last river will discover what the covenant knew about them all along: they were never last. They were the headwaters. The whole river was always flowing from them — and the God who counts every grain in the sieve, and every fish in the run, has been keeping their ledger himself.

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And I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth.