Countless horse stories provide examples of young riders leaving civilization behind for shorter or longer periods of time, when going for rides in rural settings. But sometimes these journeys back to nature serve a more profound purpose. This paper explores how the importance of the horse and rural setting are depicted, from a human perspective, in Lin Hallberg´s Vem är du Johanna? and Adzerk – den vita hingsten. I argue that the moves of the young female main characters to remote countries provide an opportunity to revalue life, thus exemplifying how the horse and nature provide prerequisites for positive changes. The pastoral tradition as used by Greg Garrard in Ecocriticism (2012, 2nd ed.) is used as an analytic tool with its three different parts: its idealization of nature; its inbuilt polarization of nature urbanity; and its power as a tool for negotiating human relationships and for finding one´s inner nature.