This chapter addresses Rytkheu’s “Modern Legends”, i.e., the novellas When the Whales Leave and Teryky ‒ two works that are based on transformation myths of the Chukchi people. My reading of the texts reveals how different metamorphoses and transformations appear as a fundamental element in Rytkheu’s description of the Arctic seashore as a natural environment. Drawing on concepts of becoming and trans-corporeality, I show that the protagonists’ metamorphoses in Rytkheu’s texts connect the (human) body with the surrounding more-than-human environment and question a dualistic demarcation between human and non-human. While the novellas are based on Indigenous oral traditions and ontologies, they are nevertheless fundamentally connected to the social and historical context of the time at which they were published. With the focus in Rytkheu’s When the Whales Leave, I show how the text uses the creation myth of the coastal Chukchi people to comment on the broader environmental situation of the Soviet Union. In particular, the work connects closely to Soviet whaling policy and the growing international and national concern for the threatening decrease of whale populations.