A California man found himself being rudely awoken early one morning by his wife telling him there was a "meowing" noise coming from their stove.

"My wife had woken up to the sound of meowing at about 4:45am and initially thought it was coming from outside," Chris Wilson from Fullerton told Newsweek. "But after searching around for a few minutes she realized it was coming from inside the house, and was able to pinpoint it to our stove hood. That's when she woke me up."

That was at about 5:30 a.m. Being abruptly woken at an ungodly hour with the news that a cat could be heard inside an stove might sound like the stuff of nightmares, but Wilson took it in his stride. "It wasn't frightening, just more comical and confusing, like how did we get a cat stuck in our house?," he said.

Evidently a cool head in a time of crisis, Wilson set to work trying to figure out what was going on. "I disassembled the hood to try and get it out, but couldn't," he said. "So I went up in the attic to see if I could free it from there but couldn't."

A picture taken looking up inside the hood confirmed what they had suspected: a kitten had gotten himself inside there and was refusing to come out.

By this point, it was late enough in the morning that Wilson was required to turn his attention to other important dad duties around the house, like taking the kids to school. "I left the hood off and hoped the cat would come out," he said."By about 2 p.m, he still hadn't, so I put a little towel in the end of the vent with some tuna, hoping to lure him down."

The tuna ended up doing the trick with the cat emerging far enough out of the hood for Wilson to pull him out to safety. The precocious cat has been cleaned up since then and treated to a few well-earned meals and naps.

Quite how the feline found his way inside the family stove is a source of mystery. "I have no idea how the cat got up there," Wilson said. "It's a single family home with no obvious way for a kitten to get on the roof. But the vent from the oven hood exits to the roof, so the cat must have gotten in through that."

While questions will likely remain unanswered, the presence of a stray cat shouldn't necessarily be a surprise. After all, according to animal welfare organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), there are as many as 70 million homeless cats and dogs struggling to survive without an owner.

Though a grim fate could have befallen this particular kitten, it turns out he chose the right stove to try and get inside. "We are keeping him," Wilson confirmed. "The vet says he's about 6 weeks old. We named him Stovetop. My wife and daughters are in love with him."

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