Fillmore is three years old, weighs rather less than the average Labrador, and, by his owner's own admission, almost always sleeps through the night.

Not last Wednesday.

At around 4.20am on 15 April, the German shorthaired pointer began barking from his unlocked crate in the master bedroom of a house on Skyway Drive in North Tustin, California — and he would not stop. His owner Eleni Dalis, 62, initially thought a coyote must be prowling the garden.

"There was no quieting him," she told the Los Angeles Times, which first reported the story. Fillmore kept going for several minutes. It was only when Mrs Dalis got up and looked out of the window that she saw "a strong red glow" outside. Walking into the kitchen, she found sparks pouring from the ceiling and the family's garage already engulfed in flames.

A minute-by-minute rescue

Mrs Dalis woke her 90-year-old mother, who also lives in the house, and got her out. She and her husband Tom then grabbed garden hoses and did what they could to stop the fire spreading to the rest of the home until the Orange County Fire Authority arrived.

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

Fillmore himself, having done the hard part, apparently decided the rest was someone else's problem. In the commotion he slipped out of his crate and was later discovered hiding and shaking in the 90-year-old's bedroom. When the family carried him outside, a line of firefighters was waiting to make a fuss of him.

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

The damage — and what was saved

The garage took the worst of it. Three cars and two electric bikes inside were, in Mrs Dalis's words, "completely unrecognizable". The cause of the blaze has not yet been determined.

The house, though, is still standing. So is the family. A single alert dog bought them the minutes they needed.

'The real MVP'

The Orange County Fire Authority has since posted a photograph of Fillmore on Instagram, posing in front of the damaged house with the crew who responded to the call. The comments, unsurprisingly, have been a parade of heart emojis and superlatives. One reader summed it up neatly: "the real MVP."

Mrs Dalis describes Fillmore as a clever, well-trained pup — a hunter by nature, sent to obedience classes as a puppy. German shorthaired pointers are bred for their nose and their nerve, and neither quality let him down in the small hours of Wednesday morning.

There is nothing especially new about a dog saving its family from a house fire. It happens often enough that fire services on both sides of the Atlantic cite it as a reminder to treat pets as part of your escape plan, not an afterthought. What keeps these stories landing, every time, is the quiet maths of them: a creature who has no idea what a garage fire is, no concept of insurance or property, simply decides the people he loves need to wake up now.

Good boy, Fillmore. Very good boy indeed.