Hero dog saves family from house fire. He barked until owners woke up and noticed the fire.

A Maryland dog is being hailed as a hero as he proved the adage about a dog being man's best friend. His quick thinking helped his owners escape an early morning house fire. According to Sarah Campbell of Frederick County Fire and Rescue, the dog, a cairn terrier named Bear, began barking around 3:45 a.m. on Monday to notify his family of the fire.

Around 4 a.m., members of Frederick County Fire and Rescue responded to the fire call. When firefighters arrived on the scene, the house was on fire, according to Battalion Chief Rusty Hahn. It took nearly 60 firefighters an hour to extinguish the flames, reports People.

"Bear’s barking alerted the wife who woke up and noticed a large glow at the back of the house. Once she opened the curtains, she noticed the back deck of the house was on fire and spreading quickly into the roof," Campbell said in an email to TODAY. The two individuals living in the home then ran out of the house with Bear before calling the authorities, according to Hahn.

"As they were exiting the house, the smoke alarms began to activate and sound properly as smoke from the fire had begun to enter the house," Campbell wrote. "If it were not for Bear, who alerted the occupants to the fire, the outcome could have been much different due to the fast-moving fire."

Sadly, the fire destroyed the house, but thanks to Bear, no one was injured. The cause of the fire has yet to be determined.

The dog's quick thinking comes just days after a North Carolina English Labrador assisted a local sheriff's office in finding a missing child. Maverick, a K-9 with the Union County Sheriff's Office in North Carolina, only needed a scent to find the boy, after his parents reported him missing.

"Being that there was a risk for the juvenile to be in a bad situation, we put Maverick on a scent article, the kid's blanket, and he was able to track based off that smell," Deputy Sheriff Joshua Dye told WBTV.

Dye, Maverick's handler, added that they tracked down to a "pretty busy highway, made one turn," and then they went along a different road. But the kid saw the police officer coming down the road, and "he actually came out of the woods and came to us, and Maverick ran right up to him, and that's how we found him," Dye said.

He stated that the police would have had a much more difficult time finding the missing boy without the Labrador's keen nose and can-do outlook. "In that situation, we were out on, we tried to ping the juvenile's cell phone, and the cell phone was actually off, and we wouldn't have anywhere to start if we didn't have the dog with us," Dye said. He went on to say that effective rescues like this one demonstrate why K-9s like Maverick are "very important" to law enforcement.

"We do a lot of training with him — every week — to make sure he stays sharp on what he's doing," Dye explained, adding that Maverick has been coached in narcotics detection, tracking, article searches and basic obedience.

In another incident, a black Labrador retriever named Max helped 63-year-old Sherry Noppe with early-onset dementia when she got lost in the woods. She was missing for three days as a rescue team looked for her. Max stayed with her throughout the ordeal and started barking loudly to alert the rescue team when they got closer. Max, who had no leash or collar on him when the rescuers found him and Noppe, could have easily run away but he stuck by Noppe for three days voluntarily.