It's dark down here, 18 feet below the wind-whipped surface, but more comfortable than the shallow niche in the rocky bank where the giant bass fed on perch yesterday afternoon. The mega-cold front, the worst in at least a decade, has marched down from the Arctic on boots of ice, pushing temperatures into the mid- to upper teens throughout most of Texas. But the water in her lake already had dropped into the 40s, much warmer than the air around it, and she was only following a primitive instinct to keep in touch with her prey. They moved deeper to escape the cold, so she followed. She's more than 14 pounds right now, her body weight increased at least 10 percent by the burden of yellow eggs she started growing last fall and that now distend her belly to grotesque proportions. She'll carry them until the water reaches at least 65 degrees, then she'll move shallow with a pesky, smaller male and do her part in keeping the bass population healthy. But there's winter to contend with today, and in response to the cold and to the lack of food within easy reach, the huge bass finds a spot near a sunken Christmas tree and hunkers down -- if a bass can hunker -- to wait. And wait. She'll stay there for 24 hours, 48 hours, maybe more, nearly in suspended animation, reserving energy, protecting her eggs until the sun comes out again, luring bait fish away from deep water, back to the areas where bass can hide, can ambush the little guys, biding her time until the spawn begins. Pick your lake, pick your bass. Try to figure her out if you want. But that's what largemouths, predator fish in some ways, are doing right now. As our latest round of cold weather shoots an icy arrow through the heart of Texas, small fish are trying to escape certain death from cold-water shock and bass are slowing down to wait out the sun. 'If I were a bass, I'd find a nice brush pile somewhere and wait,' said Steve Magnelia, a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department district biologist in San Marcos and a serious angler. 'I fished yesterday with the water temperature 53 degrees, and most fish hardly fought.' Bass are cold-water animals, and they adjust to water temperatures around them, even though they feel best around 65-75 degrees. In colder weather, they hold still more, feed less often and try to maintain through bouts of extreme cold. 'They don't really use body reserves to maintain body temperatures,' Magnelia said. 'They conserve energy and wait for the prey fish to show up.' Bass do move deeper in cold weather, Magnelia said, but not in response to the cold. 'There's probably not a tremendous change in water temperatures in water 15-20 feet deep, maybe a degree or two,' Magnelia said. 'But the prey fish are so much more susceptible to the cold and they go deeper, so the bass do, too. The deep water is more stable. There's not really a thermocline this time of year because most of the water is highly oxygenated.' Magnelia said changes in pressure, which seem to trigger bass movement prior to a front, aren't sending signals to the bass's brain the way we think. The response is much more primitive. 'You usually will have cloudy conditions and wind, and that's just more conducive to feeding,' he said. 'The bass have an advantage over the prey in those conditions, and so they feed.' And somewhere in the front's aftermath, say Sunday afternoon when the sun comes out and the temperature reaches into the 40s, bait fish are going to move again, and the bass are going to feed again. That's when anglers, if they can take the cold air that will still be worse than the water, will want to be dropping a jig or a giant lizard in front of that bass's nose. Mike Leggett writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: mleggett@statesman.com. 