WORCESTER, Vt.

WHEN a white coyote loped in front of Ivan McBeth, he should have known that his day was jinxed. It was a Friday morning in June, and Mr. McBeth was driving a borrowed truck and trailer to a stone yard in Stowe, Vt. There, he would pick up an 8-foot-tall rock and cart it to Dreamland, his homestead and school for Druids, north of Montpelier, Vt.

The plan was to stand this stone in the circle taking shape on a grassy plateau next to Mr. McBeth’s tepee. But when you encounter “coyote medicine,” he said, “if you think you have a plan, tough —.”

And then out spilled the sort of word you might use after you have waited at a stone yard for two hours and argued with the boss’s wife about the bill; after you have endured a flat tire; after a 3,000-pound stone has tipped the trailer upright and off the ball jack; after the Internal Revenue Service has written to ask how you and your wife could possibly be surviving on $6,500 a year; and after you’ve limped home, defeated, without a stone.

For all these setbacks, Mr. McBeth, 59, is generally recognized as the world’s most prodigious builder of megalithic stone circles. Think of them as backyard Stonehenges: instant artifacts of a new stone age.