It was just after 4.20 in the morning when Fillmore decided his family needed to wake up — right now.

The three-year-old German shorthaired pointer, who almost always sleeps soundly through the night, began barking urgently from his unlocked crate in the master bedroom of the Dalis family home in North Tustin, California.

"There was no quieting him," owner Eleni Dalis, 62, told the Los Angeles Times. At first she assumed he had spotted a coyote. Then she looked out of her bedroom window and saw a "strong red glow" coming from the direction of the neighbour's house.

It was only when she walked into her own kitchen that she realised the danger was much closer to home. Sparks were shooting from the ceiling. The family's garage was engulfed in flames.

Mrs Dalis rushed to wake her 90-year-old mother, who also lives at the Skyway Drive property. She and her husband Tom then grabbed garden hoses and battled the blaze themselves until Orange County Fire Authority crews arrived.

"If he didn't wake us up, we would have lost the house," she said.

Three cars and two electric bikes parked in the garage were destroyed — "completely unrecognisable", in Mrs Dalis's words. The cause of the fire is still under investigation. But thanks to one very alert pointer, no one was hurt.

One very good boy

Fillmore himself had a fright. During the chaos he slipped out of his crate and was eventually found hiding in the 90-year-old's bedroom, trembling. When firefighters coaxed him outside, the welcome was rather warmer.

"They were all over him," Mrs Dalis said. "He was definitely feeling the love."

A photograph posted by the Orange County Fire Authority on Instagram shows Fillmore sitting proudly in front of his home, flanked by his rescuers. The comments quickly filled with praise. One admirer dubbed him "the real MVP".

The Dalises describe their pointer as exceptionally smart, well-trained and a hunter by nature — qualities that may have sharpened his instinct that something was very wrong long before any human could have smelled smoke. As a puppy he attended obedience classes; on this occasion, the obedience flowed the other way.

German shorthaired pointers are bred for stamina and a keen nose, traits prized by hunters and increasingly recognised in search-and-rescue work. Fillmore, it seems, has added "household fire alarm" to the breed's CV.

For the Dalis family, a morning that began with terror ended with profound gratitude — for firefighters, for the garden hose that bought them precious minutes, and most of all for a barking dog who refused to be ignored.

Three lives saved. One very good boy.