Very this is an excellent sprite, great form and good AA. Esker your new revamped image has good additions (namely the forearm hair details). I reall like how this is turning out. Being that you went with a somewhat toonish/cell-shaded look, its would be best if you kept your hair detail to the edges. Ex: in your new pic you have 3 gray pixels in the formarm, they look misplaced, unconnected. You might wish to either remove them or connect them to the outline.
As far as the design goes, its very simple, very cool. You may wish to lengthen the tail a bit or extend some of the tail's fur. Perhaps you could take the lightest fur tone and place it on the axe as a 'cross' pattern to act as a shine. Even a single dot would do.
Like Filax_666 said, you used quite a few colors, most of your wasted colors are the near-black tones. You could probably merge all of them and notice no detail lost.
Again wonderful work ^_^.