A woman came to the rescue of a newborn kitten she spotted stranded on a stretch of busy highway, and she told Newsweek about her brave rescue mission.

Becca Tremmel, an artist, musician and music teacher from Nashville, Tennessee was driving home on I65 late one afternoon when she saw something on the road that forced her to bring the traffic behind her to a halt.

"I spotted an orange thing near the white lines in the middle lane," Tremmel said. "I saw him moving his little head around and I gasped."

The "orange thing" in question was a tiny kitten, most likely a newborn given his size, who had somehow ended up in the middle of the road and in the gravest of danger.

Tremmel has always adored animals having grown up surrounded by them in her family home back in Sundance, Utah. "My family got tired of me always bringing home orphaned kittens or injured birds, but they humored me," she said. "Now I volunteer at a wildlife rehab and also a horse rescue and it is so rewarding."

So she wasted little time in coming to the stricken kitten's aid. "I pulled up, put on my flashers, because there was a semi behind me, then got out and grabbed the kitten," Tremmel said. "I held my hand up in the next lane to stop people. A guy then pulled up and asked 'what is that?' And I was like 'a kitten!!!'"

Tremmel doesn't know how the kitten ended up out on the highway. "He doesn't have any road rash so I doubt he was thrown from a window or dropped from a high place," she said. "Someone brought up a good point that the mama could've put her kittens inside of a car engine to keep them warm and he could've fallen out on the freeway maybe."

The main thing was that he was uninjured, which was nothing short of a miracle given the circumstances. "Nothing appears to be broken and he's very alert and crawling around," she said.

Given the circumstances, it's not an exaggeration to suggest Tremmel saved the kitten's life with her quick-thinking actions. However, she's keen to downplay her role.

"I'd like to think that if I hadn't stopped then hopefully someone else would have saved him," she said. "I'm just thankful he's safe and doing really well right now."

The ASPCA estimates that as many as 3.2 million cats enter the shelter system in the U.S. every year. This particular kitten could so easily have been added to that number but Tremmel loves animals and she wasn't about to let this cat, who she has now christened Willie, suffer that fate. "I'm calling him Willie because he's a highwayman, but we'll see if it sticks," she said.

Part of that is down to how well he has responded to her care. "He's very active and alert and he quickly learned how to feed from the bottle," she said.

Though Tremmel is coy on the subject, it sounds like he's found a home for life. "He's such a fighter and I'm so blessed to have him," Tremmel said. "I'm definitely leaning toward keeping him but I will have to discuss it with my other two cats."

All of which makes that chance encounter and the rescue that followed all the more incredible. "It definitely feels like fate finding Willie. I've always felt that my guardian angels come in animal form and they always appear in crazy ways like the middle of a freeway! I'm so thankful for him."