Billy being the larger of the two turned and tumbled in the air, rolling from face down just before splashing into the creek.
Joe had tried diving before and held his feet out straight and fell as such into the creek like some long bodied bomb.
Both friends hit the water just milli-seconds apart, looking at the face of their friend with such fear as if eight might never see the other again.
Splashing into the water it was Billy that heard a grated maon, and felt as if he had it something floating on the water's surface.
A scramble of young arms and legs turned the boys to head for the surface of the deep watered creek.
Breaking the surface first was Joe, he being the better swimmer of the two and as luck would have it he met an angred lump that was lolling about for an afternoon swim in the creek's cool water.
Billy burst the surface a second later, his eyes still wide open from the absolute fear of such a jump, fall, and landing in a cold spring fed waters of the creek.
Joe was in the water up to his neck, the back of his head toward where Billy burst to the creek surface.
There standing on a rock jutting from the shore was this little manly figure, he had the look of a man filled with anger and the thought of doing ill to two friends.
Billy called to Joe, but Joe did not move.
He then swam to his friend and with the touch of his hand to a shoulder he felt a shock like some jolt of electricity.
The shock knocked Billy backwards in the water, dazing him and leaving him to give in to the creek's flow and begin to drift from Joe.
As his eyes strained to see his friend it was the sight of how Joe's ears spouted from the sides of his head. Ears jutting outward, turning pointed, and quite hairy. Billy tried to keep from turning as he floated downstream, seeing as he did how Joe seemed to change about his head, spouting cruving horns, his hair becoming shaggy and his shoulders seemingly then were broader.
One friendly tree branch caught Billy and directed him from the main stream to the slower moving waters nearer the creekside.
He was there able to swim slowly, catching the friendly branches and working his way to the shore.
Cries of terror turned to screams of an anguished animal as Joe scrambled from the water to stand before the angry little man.
Billy was some distance from his friend, but well able to see what had happened to him. there on the rocky shore stood what was minutes before his best friend. Joe was no longer his healthy human self, but had by the magical power of this small man become a male goat.
Bleating as if pleading to be released from living a cursed life as an animal and a goat, Joe made the sounds echo the gully.
The little man pointed his crooked index finger at Joe, cursing him to remain a goat and live like the brute he really was for a full year. He further damned the goat to abstain from being overly friendly with females of his new kind; less from such endeavors he would remain forever locked into the beastly body and lifestyle that it was to be a male goat.
Then with Joe throughly cursed and damned, he took to searching the shoreline for the other fellow that had so nastily disturbed his afternoon soak.