This last week went bad very fast.
There's this stray mama cat we call Socks that regulalry comes to my grandmother's house to have kittens. The trouble is by the time we learn that she's back and had kittens again, we can never find them so that we can catch them and put an end to the cycle.
And as for Socks, she grew to trust me to a point where she'd walk up to me and beg for scraps, but if she so much as thought that I was trying to touch her she'd run off.
And I've had enough cats growing up to know better than to grab one that doesn't want to be messed with.

Earlier this week Socks showed up again with 7 KITTENS that she had given birth to somewhere else in the neighborhood. They were small things roughly 3-4 weeks old, they're eyes were all open and they could walk and run around. Several of them cautiously sniffed my hand when I offered it, which gave us the hope that we could get enough of the babies to trust me so that the rest would follow suit, ergo making it easier to catch them and send them to good homes.
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to think of a way to catch first the the babies and then Socks, when I had a rare oppurtunity given to me early the next morning. When I went out to get food for the dogs, all of the little kittens had curled up in the longhandled dustpan we keep next to the storage room!
Not wanting to waste the chance, I went to get the big dog carrier out of the garage in the back yard. But by the time I got that damn thing out of the cluttered garage and over the backyard fence, all while trying to make as little noise as possible so that the kittens wouldn't wake up and scatter, I came back to find that Socks had woken the kittens up to feed them.
I spent a good deal of the day poking my head in the window to see if the kittens would go back to sleep in the dustpan so I could try again, but later that afternoon when I eventually had to go back out for something, Socks and her kittens were nowhere to be seen.
Fuming, I went back and inside and hoped I'd have the same chance tomorrow.

When I got up the next day, grandmother had already let out the two dogs. Shortly we became aware of the dogs barking like crazy. We looked out to find them both on either side of the old shed.
The worst instantly dawned on us. Not only was Socks stupid enough to move the kittens into the backyard where we let the dogs out, she was stupid enough to not even put them in the garage where they could hide.
After chasing the dogs away, I ran down there to find that one of the poor kittens, while intact, was very dead. The rest were all cowering in fear in the space between the shed and the wooden fence.
It took a lot of work to fish them all out and into the pet carrier. I moved them to the car port where Sock's could find them, and by the end of the day she actually let me pick her up and put her in there with her remaining babies.
I buried the kitten that died, the only solid white one in the bunch. and buried him next to my grandmother's flower garden in the front yard. A friend of the family took Socks and her kittens so that they could socialized and given to good homes.