It was a quiet afternoon in Bristol, Virginia, when Angela Ramsey and her daughter decided to run errands along Lee Highway. While eating lunch in their car in between stops, they heard a muffled yelp below their feet.
The mother and daughter duo got out of the car to investigate, but they couldn’t locate the cries.
“We kept hearing a cat but couldn’t figure out where it was at,” Ramsey wrote on Facebook. “I popped my hood to look and didn’t see anything, but I could hear it.”
Ramsey and her daughter searched high and low for a distressed cat. They scoured the car for hiding places and eventually discovered a 5-week-old kitten wedged in the wheel well above the front left tire.
“The kitten was stuck and couldn’t get free,” Ramsey wrote.
Seconds later, a couple of Good Samaritans pulled over to help. They successfully coaxed him from his hiding place a few moments later, but the scared kitten ran away before anyone could catch him.
You can watch that moment here:
The kitten bolted to a nearby creek and eventually scurried into a pile of boulders along the bank. Burrowed deep within the boulder pile, he became unreachable again. He’d need an entire team of experts to save him this time.
Ramsey contacted her local animal control office, which dispatched officer Larry Boardwine to the scene. Minutes later, three sheriff deputies—Lindsey Clayman, Crystal Maldonado and Summer Richards — arrived to assist in the rescue efforts. The team banded together to locate and extract the kitten from the rock pile, but each attempt sadly failed.
They were just starting to lose hope when Captain Maynard Ratcliff appeared. After surveying the situation, Captain Ratcliff thought of one possible solution the team hadn’t tried yet.
“[H]e contacted the Bristol, [Virginia], fire [department] to help move the big heavy rocks,” Ramsey wrote. “Firefighters tried everything they could think of and finally got the kitten to come out!”
After hours of trying, the team of first responders triumphantly pulled the cat out of the boulder pile and hugged him tightly to their chests.
Ramsey’s best friend, who’d been on FaceTime with her through the whole ordeal, instantly fell in love with the kitten and offered him a forever home.
“My best friend immediately wanted this kitten as soon as she saw the picture and video of [him],” Ramsey wrote.
The team of rescuers kissed the kitten, later named River, goodbye and wished him a happy life with his new family.
It’s been a couple of weeks since River’s rescue, and the sweet cat is doing better than ever. When she ventured out to run errands that day, Ramsey never expected to find a kitten, but she’s so glad they crossed paths. Now, she gets to watch the adorable kitten grow up by her best friend’s side.
“The kitten is now in very good hands with my best friend and [is] so loved,” Ramsey wrote.
